


The Path to the Precipice

by Tierfal



Series: Loud and Clear [5]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-09 04:22:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 56,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11661534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: This isn't the first time Ed's seen the far side of a parabola, and it won't be the last.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> These next two chapters are, bizarrely enough, among my favorites in the whole series… because they just… hurt a lot. :'D I'm into the whole fictional catharsis thing! Hopefully you are, too.
> 
> Also, credit where it's due: I had Elle King's "Under the Influence" playing on repeat during much of the time I was brainstorming and/or writing, and it helped a hell of a lot. ._.
> 
> One more thing! I'm hoping that I _might_ have Part 6 ready to go by the time I finish this one, but for the sake of my own anxiety, it may have to wait until I'm further into writing Part 7 so that I feel like I have a handle on this shit. XD (This is, for the record, also a good thing in terms of the fic itself, because I still have a long way to go lining up the present-day stuff with the past sections, so hopefully a slightly longer wait would make for a better read!) There's also the fact that the final chapter of this part should be hitting your screen the weekend before CrunchyRoll Expo, and I have no idea if I would get a chance to update around that even if the fic is ready. I'll try to keep you guys posted! (…haha, _posted_. *finger guns*)
> 
>  
> 
>  **RECAP:** We left off at the worst possible place I could ever end a fic, i.e. with present-day!Ed having just found out that Roy's time in Afghanistan was darker than he realized, and that Roy is being called as a witness for Bradley's war crimes trial; and with past-tense Ed having just walked out of Roy's place following their first real fight.

He wants to find words for this.

He wants to find something he can use to quantify it—to cage it, to _contain_ it, because that’s what words are for, aren’t they?  Expression is an outlet.  If you can categorize your own psyche accurately enough to describe it—well enough to make yourself understood—then you’re back in control.  The act of articulation makes things… smaller.  Simpler.  Surmountable.

He wants this to be smaller.

He wants this never to have fucking happened, actually, but compressing it into the scope of speech would be a decent fucking start.

His hands are shaking.  Or the room is shaking.  Or everything is shaking; maybe it’s a localized earthquake.  Maybe the banks of the Thames are collapsing, and this whole place is about to crumble into the river and shit, and everyone will drown.

Probably it’s his hands.  But it does kind of feel like drowning.

He reaches over and fumbles to catch the lid of the laptop and press it shut.  He sits still for another second, listening to the breath go in and out of him, and then he stretches over to the nightstand to get his phone.

Mistake.  His shoulder’s _pissed_.  You’d think a major bodily joint like that would appreciate all of the time and effort and calories and whatnot that he’s put into keeping it operational, but it never seems to cut him any slack.

A herculean effort and a lot of teeth-gritting gets him settled again with the phone.  He taps in to his text log with Roy and just…

Fuck.

It’s all—

Sweetness.  _Sincere_ sweetness; honey straight through, never Splenda.  Sticky-warm and soothing and so fucking gentle, so immensely kind—

Roy has not changed.

Ed’s perception of him has changed, because there was a piece of him that he’s been holding out of the light.

But the shape of him—

The _core_ of him—

And Ed should have known.  Shouldn’t he?  He should have thought about it—probably he would have, if he hadn’t always, _always_ been such a self-centered, tunnel-visioned piece of shit.  Somebody else would have looked at Roy and tried to guess at that interiority.  Somebody else would have found a way to ask.  Somebody else would have watched him, intently, and thought, _He’s an ex-soldier with post-traumatic stress.  What has he seen?  What has he done?_

Somebody else would have cared enough to be prepared for this.

Somebody else would have thought this through and sorted it the fuck out.

He looks at the wall until it starts to get fuzzy, and then he looks at the Subway logo bag with his sandwich still languishing inside.

Fucking surreal.

He looks down at the phone.

Thousands and thousands of times, he’s whapped this thing with the tips of his thumbs and spelled out messages to the man on the other end of this imaginary ley line.

 _The hotel internet crapped out,_ he types.  _I didn’t mean to cut you off in the middle of anything.  I think I need a little time to think about this though anyway so can we talk about it more later?_

That’s probably the single most fucking formal and clinical and impersonal thing he’s ever written to Roy Mustang.

God, his fucking _heart_ hurts.

He sends it.

He sits back and thinks about how he should eat the sandwich—he should at least try—and… doesn’t fucking move.

He set the phone down on the bed a little ways off to his right.

It buzzes.

He picks it up.

He doesn’t let his eyes focus on the preview before he swipes over to the full message, but it turns out it’s not very long.

_Of course.  Just let me know when works for you._

It sounds like they’re scheduling a fucking meeting.  He’s read cover letters with more character; he’s read Craigslist posts full of more fucking love—

Roy’s just trying not to guilt-trip him or anything by assailing him with little pixel hearts to remind him of how fucking good they’ve been—of how good Roy’s been _to_ him.  And that’s… great, really.  Classy.  Fucking noble or some shit.

And it hurts.

It’s his own fucking fault.  He gave Roy exactly jackshit to go on as far as his mood, his feelings, his inclinations—which is because he doesn’t have the slightest goddamn idea idea what they _are_ , yeah, but that doesn’t exactly change the deliberate opacity of what he sent.

Roy’s so often the person he goes to for advice.  Ain’t that a bitch?  It’s Roy when it’s not Al, these days, and Ed can’t bother Al with this right now.  Al’s picked up enough of his fucking messes over the years; Al’s got a preggo wife and an embryo to worry about.  Al’s got ninety-nine problems, and Ed’s incredible shortsightedness should not be tallied as one more.

He’s not going to fling this into anybody else’s lap.  He’s been falling back on the usual suspects his whole fucking life—he’s an _adult_ now, for Christ’s sake; he needs to figure out some fucking way to do this shit on his own.  He’s relied on other people to untangle the giant knots his brain gets into for far too long.

It’s his responsibility.  His life, his fucked-up psychological and emotional shit—it’s his problem.  Nobody else should have to waste their time struggling to sort him out.

There’s got to be something he can do.

He’s not just a problem-solver; he’s a problem- _destroyer_.  That’s what he does.  Somebody says the word “impossible”, and he says “Fuck that shit.”

So—what?  He needs to dig some kind of a conclusion out of the static of overlapping feelings.  He needs to make an informed decision of some kind.

Ah.  Information.  Maybe—maybe this time, knowledge really could be power; maybe part of what’s defeating him here is simply the fact that he does not, and _cannot_ , understand.  And with more background, maybe—with at least an idea—

Well, hell.  He shouldn’t get too ahead of himself.  A couple of clicks around Wikipedia aren’t going to add up to some kind of silver fucking bullet to tear through the walls around him and set him free.

But he doesn’t know much more than jackshit about… any of it.  The war in Afghanistan; _any_ modern war.  What happened.  What it’s like.  What it can cause otherwise rational people to do.

Context matters.  It doesn’t exonerate, necessarily, but it does make a difference.  Doesn’t it?

Fuck.

Even if he does dig deep into the web archives of what this shit really means, on the human-being level—where do you draw the line between empathy and apologism?

Also pertinent: if his hotel internet’s out, how the fuck is he even supposed to try?

He lowers his face back into his hands again, curling his fingers into his hair.

He’s going to get through this.  He’s gotten through everything that came before.

  


* * *

  


Ed couldn’t remember whether any of the students in his Tuesday class had bravely enrolled in one of his Wednesday ones as well.  He certainly fucking hoped not; he’d scraped up a couple hours of sleep last night, but the whole damn week was catching up: his eyes were red, and his skin felt like melted bubble gum, and his head ached like a motherfucker, and his balance was shot to shit, and he couldn’t keep his shoulders up and squared for the fucking life of him; they were just too _heavy_ now.  If any of the kids recognized these as yesterday’s clothes, wrinkled to hell—Al, the pinnacle of brotherly charity, had kindly provided him with clean underwear, but none of Al’s clothes fit him right, and the last thing he wanted on the worst day in several years was to have to roll up the cuffs of his baby brother’s fucking jeans—he was twice as fucking doomed.  Somebody’d probably report him for coming to class hungover, or high, or still drunk, and the first six months were like a probationary thing, where the university could fire his ass with barely any paperwork and hardly a second thought, and that was just what he fucking _needed_ right about now.

That was just what he fucking deserved.

On the meager, halfheartedly-gleaming little bright side, both of the classes he had to teach today were morning ones—which, firstly, had obligated him to drag his miserable ass off of Al’s and Winry’s couch at a reasonable hour; and which also meant that he got the two ordeals over with by eleven forty-five.  That done, he was free to loathe every fiber of his own being in peace and quiet; all he had to do was slog the half-mile from the assigned classroom back to his lab without dropping his bag on the ground and shattering his laptop and losing his NIH grant once and for all.  He was worried enough about the fact that the poor thing had only had about half an hour of battery life left when he’d scrambled to the school this morning, and he hadn’t had a chance to get to the lab before class to plug it in with his spare cord; the other one was at—

Was not at Al’s place.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, just once.

Probably it was Al.  Right?  Probably it was Al.

Except that Al didn’t know Ed’s class schedule yet, and Al was probably in his own classes right now, and Al usually preferred to call.

Maybe it was—Winry, then.  Texting from the store to ask him whether he wanted the Hello Kitty sheets or the hilariously-unnatural-color-schemed-camo ones for the air mattress she was about to buy, or something, but in that wink-wink-rib-nudge way that meant she was _really_ asking whether he was okay, because she was stupid enough to love him, just like Al and…

Maybe it was—

He wrangled his phone out of his pocket while his heart tried to scramble up his throat.

Roy.

Three words.

_Please call me?_

No.  No, no, no.  Not—no.

He shoved the phone back into the depths, back into the confines, back to where it couldn’t fucking accuse him with the pleading pixels and the invitation to swipe across the screen and tap the way, way too familiar name and call him up and hear his voice and—

No.

He wasn’t going to think it.  He wasn’t going to think _about_ it.  He wasn’t going to dump another sky-high fucking pile of steaming bullshit onto that man’s otherwise successful life right now; hadn’t he sabotaged enough?

He gripped the strap of his laptop bag and put his stupid fucking head down and trudged back to his lab.  It was fine.  He’d be fine.  He was always fucking fine; it was his trademark; it was his other-other side job.  No parents?  No problem.  No future?  Fuck that.  No perfect fucking gorgeous fucking boyfriend who made him feel like he mattered and was worth something and deserved to be happy sometimes?  Whatever; he was better off alone anyway, probably; the whole beautiful mirage was really only heat waves flirting with the sand, and he was just going to keep going.

It was all you ever could do.  It was all you ever had, all you ever _really_ had—your own two feet, and the steel inside you.  The resolve.  The stubbornness.  Nobody else was gonna pull you through it all but _you_.

He let himself into the lab and unearthed his cord from underneath the files on the desk.  He plugged his laptop in and sat down and put up every fucking wall he had in his brain.

He wasn’t going to think about it.

He was going to get this done, and then the next thing, and then the next; he was going to finish as much of the grant as he could manage and then go back to Al’s and Winry’s, and probably they’d have food, and then he’d sleep, and then…

And then tomorrow.

And that was fine.

He closed his eyes, and then he cracked his knuckles and got the fuck to work.

  


* * *

  


The sun was dropping—fading, slowly, over the horizon; somewhere in the distance, sinking into the sea.

It was another vibration from his phone in his pocket that had shaken him out of the work-trance.  He’d hit a relatively good place to stop—just a couple little tweaks left for the grant app; just edits and shit, and realistically he probably needed a break to feed some clean oxygen into his brain.

But he didn’t want to look.

He didn’t want to look; he didn’t want to know; but what if it was Al asking whether he was alive, or the NIH had eaten him, and…?

He fished the phone out just far enough to glance at the beginning of the message on the screen.

_Ed, please.  Please.  Can we talk?  I’m sorry.  We can fix this -- you know that, tell me you know that.  This is too important to lose over something so absolutely insignificant as laundry, for God’s sake -- Ed, YOU are too important to lose for the whole world, and there’s NOTHING I wouldn’t do for you; you know that, don’t you?  Please, Ed, PLEASE, just five minutes, just let me—_

No.

He tucked it back into his pocket, knuckled at his eyes, saved everything he’d been working on, packed up his shit, and locked up the lab.

No, no, no.

Had they put him in the single furthest building from the parking lot on purpose, or was it just his shitty-ass luck making an appearance before he could hazard that maybe it had mellowed out over the years?  Didn’t really matter either way.  Long, long, winding fucking paths; and he was _tired_ ; he was at the point of exhaustion with the brittle-edged numbness and the heavy, heavy feet.

Al and Winry wouldn’t mind if he crashed their usual romantic dinner-for-two plans, would they?  It’d just be—for a little while.  Just until—a while.  Just until he figured out what the fuck he was going to do, and where he was going to go, and…

He didn’t have anything.  He didn’t have a single fucking _thing_ , did he?  Not anymore; not since he’d sectioned his whole world into suitcase-sized pieces and dropped all the baggage into Roy’s living room.  Not since he let every fiber of his being worm in among the strands of Roy’s and tangle up and thrive.  Not since their veins meshed, and their heartbeats synched up so close it only ever sounded like one—

He could see his car.  His beat-to-shit, dirty-as-hell, banged-up, dented little chariot.

He should’ve known.  He should’ve known from the first time he saw his personal piece of crap jalopy parked next to Roy’s sleek, clean, powerfully-purring Mustang.  He should have known that he was not the type of fucked-up, tapped-out kid who could do that— _be_ that, be a _part_ of that, sustain a partnership with someone as sharp and smart and together as the man who could afford to buy and had the guts to drive a car like _that_.

He should have known it was doomed from the start.

He had, hadn’t he?  A part of him.  A part of him had been waiting.  A part of him had been pulling backwards; a part of him had read the writing on the wall, and there was no mistaking what it said; a part of him had recognized that trajectories didn’t just change because of a single variable.

Funny, to think about it that way.  Roy wasn’t enough.  Roy wasn’t enough to alter the fundamental tenets of Ed’s being that made him such a useless piece of shit.  Roy wasn’t enough to make him _good_ —better, yes; and safer, and happier, and… But not good.  Not fixed.  Not okay; not normal; not the kind of person who had a fucking chance.  Not the kind of person you could stay with.  Not the kind of person who could make a life with you, because they didn’t fucking have one.  Because they didn’t know how.

Ed’s shoulder ached.  His head did, too, come to think of it.  His eyes stung a little.  Sleep deprivation would do that for you.

He braced his left hand against the dusty top of the trusty metal frame of the Civic and shoved the right into his pocket to dig for his keys.  He fished them out and tried not to look at them, but he knew that the other key was there; not looking didn’t make it not exist, just like not saying things didn’t stop them from being true.

What was he going to do?

How was he supposed to go back there and get all his shit from Roy’s house?  His toothbrush was in the bathroom.  His clothes were in the closet; all his books were filed in alphabetically, more or less.  He’d brought his knickknacks and his computer shit and his DVDs and his towels and his hairbrush and his jackets and his little scale model of the universe that turned in proportionate time.  He’d left socks in the godforsaken fucking laundry bin that had lit a side fuse on this fucking time-bomb and blown it all up right in his fucking _face_ , and—

And he didn’t know how you were supposed to extract yourself from shit like that.

He’d sort of had to pry himself apart from Ling, sure, but that’d been… college-dorm amounts of shit.  He would’ve been moving anyway.  It was just bedding to ball up and a couple of photos to burn with a sixty-five-cent Bic lighter from the corner store—slowly, one at a time, with the trash can pulled over to the open window so it wouldn’t set off the smoke alarm.

Al had done it for him, with Greg.  And he hadn’t really—settled in there.  Not the same way.  Not like throwing his whole life a blender with somebody else’s and really, truly, _honestly_ fucking believing, for a while there, that it’d come out as something worth keeping.

Were you a shittier human being if you went at a time you knew they weren’t there and just blitzed the place, and they came home and saw you’d rifled through everything and then disappeared?  Or was it worse to show up and walk right in and look them in the eyes and then grab as much of your crap as you could remember?

Did you just—ask them to mail you the rest if you forgot something, or leave it for lost, or—

How was he supposed to _look_ at Roy and—

His hand shook as he jammed the fucking keys in the fucking door and unlocked the car and hiked up his laptop bag to sling it onto the passenger seat and dropped his body into the seat on the driver’s side.

He put the keys in the ignition.

And then he put his head in his fucking hands.

You weren’t supposed to fuck it up like this.  You just _weren’t_.  When you had a thing this good going, you were supposed to do anything you had to to keep it afloat.

But then they—the indescribable, ineffable, elusive fucking “ _they_ ”—always said that if you really loved someone, you were supposed to let them go.  You were supposed to want them to be happy, no matter what—even if that meant getting your dumb ass the fuck out of their life.  That was supposed to be the ultimate self-sacrificing gesture, right?

And he did.  Holy fucking _hell_ , it was like nothing he’d ever—it was like the axis of the fucking universe; it was like the foundation of the world; it was like having his whole ribcage packed full of stars, and every goddamn fucking time Roy looked his way, just supernovas straight through.

It felt like coming home.  He finally had a home to _go_ to.  Open arms and that same fucking smile that’d snared him over the rim of a coffee cup all that time ago and never faded a fucking _bit_.

It was so—good.  That was the absolute fucking bitch of it.  It was the best thing that’d ever happened to him—except for Al, obviously, but Al was part of his bones and his blood; Al was the reason he existed.  Al hadn’t happened; Al just was.

Roy had _happened_.  Roy had happened to him, like a bolt out of the fucking blue, and lightning had never been so beautiful, or so warm—

But he couldn’t be good back.

That was the thing.

He couldn’t be what Roy needed—what Roy deserved.

He was too fucking broken and too fucking tired and too fucking weak.  Too selfish.

This was his opportunity to fix that.

That was what it came down to, in the end.

He had to find it in himself to follow through.

Roy would be okay.  Roy would be better than okay.  This part would be tough, but Roy’d gotten through a hell of a lot worse, hadn’t he?  And he had people.  He had Gracia and Riza just for starters; they’d help him.  Ed was just—Ed was… tolerable.  That was the thing.  Ed wasn’t _bad_ , and he really had tried.  Roy knew that.  And they’d gotten along well, and that always helped, but—he wasn’t anything spectacular.  He wasn’t unforgettable.  He wasn’t great; he hadn’t lit up anything in the core of Roy’s being and just made it _right_.  He wasn’t like that.  He couldn’t do that for someone.

And that was fine.  People were different; that was what made the fucking world go ’round; didn’t take an assistant professorship in genetics—which he had now—to know that.  Variation was important and all that shit.

Roy would be fine.  Roy would come across somebody who was better than just acceptable, and they’d fall all over themselves trying to get at him, because—well, shit, who wouldn’t?  He was gorgeous and sweet and romantic and affectionate and funny and dorky and sexy as _hell_ , and—

And Ed was crying, quietly—strangled little sobs in his stupid fucking car with both hands held over his mouth.

He was really going to do this.

He was going to walk in there—not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but soon—and kill this thing.  Slaughter it.  Cut its throat and stand there while it bled out.  He could.  He knew he could; he’d never set his fucking mind to something and failed before.  Not when it mattered this much.

It was so fucking shitty that all he wanted right now was Roy’s hands on his face—carding through his hair, stroking at his ears; down his neck, along his jaw, butterfly-fucking-light and always so damn gentle, like he was precious, and fingerprints on the surface of him were a crime.

But he wasn’t worthy of it.  That was why he was here in the fucking first place.  He’d left Roy out to fucking dry—let him down again and again and again, like always.  Story of his damn life; same words on different pages; every chapter always finished up that way.

Roy would move on.  Roy would be fine.

And Ed would, too, somehow.

He was good at that—at surviving.  Like a cockroach.  Like a leech.

He’d make it.

He’d done it before.

This piteous weeping in the car bullshit was so damn self-indulgent—he hadn’t earned this.  There were people in other places—there were people _here_ , in this country, probably in this city, just down the road—who had real problems.  Real shit.  Stuff worth fucking crying about.

He tilted his head back and breathed slow for a couple of seconds, and then he scrubbed the heels of his hands at his eyes.  He had to have a fucking napkin in here somewhere.  Maybe in his bag.  A survey of the pockets—velcro was so fucking loud right now; his head was ringing—yielded up nothing but a pen and a USB drive he didn’t even remember buying, so he resorted to the tried-and-true method of mopping at the wet trails with his sleeves.

Fucking pathetic.  He was a grown-ass man, and he’d done this to himself.  No wonder nobody could put up with him for more than a couple months at a stretch.

He gave himself another thirty seconds to breathe slowly and blink the last of the water out of his eyes.  He was fine.  He had it under control and all that shit; he had it handled.

The dried salt felt sticky on his face, but it wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t drive or anything, so he started the car and headed for Al’s place.  It was fine.  He’d be fine.

He had to stop thinking about it and fucking _drive_ —campus was a nightmare even when you weren’t distracted as shit; students would stroll out into the road or come careening out of nowhere on their bikes, and there were a thousand stop signs and no directional arrows, so people who weren’t used to getting around would slow down and check their phones and generally just get hopelessly lost all the time.

He should’ve called Al before he left—asked if they needed him to pick up anything at the store or something.  Like maybe a new model of Al’s fuckup brother who wouldn’t totally screw everything and beg to crash at his place for the foreseeable future, until he found a studio or something that he could afford.  If he got one close enough, maybe he could bike in to campus instead of driving; that’d save him some money on the parking permit and the gas and the maintenance and shit, although it would also greatly increase the likelihood of him ending up as a smear of guts on the pavement.

That didn’t sound nearly as off-putting as it should have right now.

Right.  Driving.  Turns and taillights.  Paying attention.

As he turned into the cutesy little residential area where Al’s and Winry’s love den—er, apartment—was to be found, a set of those shitty-ass aftermarket LED headlights blinded him in his rearview.  Of course the guy was going the same way on a night like tonight—of _course_ he was.  Little shit like that wouldn’t have annoyed Ed so much on any other day; little shit like that would roll off his back, because he’d think about Al or Roy and put it in perspective and let it go.

Hadn’t people gotten hurtby those goddamn things?  Had anybody done a study yet?  He was still blinking the twin-starburst afterimage from the backs of his eyelids; surely people got surprised by them all the time or looked too long and couldn’t see jackshit and swerved or—

It was a black Lexus.

No real surprise there; demographically, the Lexus and the BMW assholes drove not just like they were the only people on the road, but the only ones on the _planet_ , and even if other people existed, they were plebs who didn’t count.  Still—it’d only been pretty recently that Ed had stopped jumping out of his skin every time he saw the circled _L_ gleaming from a black hood.

A second glance—just to check his mirrors, obviously; not because he was paranoid or some shit—in the rearview confirmed his first half-conscious observation that this was either a brand-fucking-new model or the cleanest older one he’d ever laid eyes on.  Then again, there were people in the world who regularly _washed_ their cars, weren’t there?  He didn’t happen to be one of them, and he’d never met one in real life, but that didn’t disprove their existence, scientifically.

The nearest he’d come to a close encounter of the Car Washer Kind was the extremely memorable Saturday where Roy had pulled the Mustang out into his driveway and put on a ragged pair of jeans and a torn white T-shirt and gotten so sudsy Ed had almost had a fucking aneurysm on the doorstep watching him squeeze the sponge.

Fuck.

 _Roy_.

Fuck everything; Ed just wanted to—what?  Drive his car into somebody’s brick-walled fucking house and hope he went quick?

No.  Never that.  He was doing the right thing, and he knew it; he was doing the best thing for everyone, and he was going to muddle through this shit, and he was going to stagger out on the other side better for it—better, and just fucking _fine_.  They were both going to be fine.  They’d both had worse and bounced right the fuck back, after all.  That was what life was about—the fucking rebound.  Riding the sine wave as far as it went, no matter how much whiplash that entailed.

Motherfucking piece of shit; he’d missed the turn.  Douchebag McLexus, who was still a generous car-length behind, was probably wondering if he was drunk by now; even assholes deserved to get to drive home without some fucking shaky-handed weirdo weaving around all over suburbia in front of them.

Ed pushed his hair back, took advantage of the next intersection, and kept turning left until he’d gotten back onto the first stupid street.  Whatever city planner was responsible for this shit deserved to get caned in the kneecaps; not only was this place a fucking labyrinth, all the street names were Plant-Vine-Something, with such tiny variations that you could never tell which one was which, and Grapeleaf turned into Leafwine, and neither of those were even fucking _words_ , and…

What the hell was Douchebag still doing behind him?  Maybe he didn’t come here often enough to figure it the fuck out either.  Maybe he was new.  Maybe he was visiting someone.

Ed had to commit his full attention to driving—or eighty percent of it; the last twenty he reserved for breathing as slowly and evenly as he could.

He had his hand clenched in his hair.

 _Fuck_.

One by one he pried his fingers loose, and then he clenched both hands around the steering wheel—ten and two—and gently eased his foot onto the brake as he approached another of the sixteen billion stop signs in this horrible little cottage-crammed maze.

White light flared in his rearview—

And the whole world collapsed into a deafening metal crash-scream; the force of the impact flung him forward, and his forehead slammed into the top of his steering wheel.

Gold and black and white-edged stars smeared and flitted and flickered across his vision, and something hot draggled downward into his eyebrow and started to sting in his eye, and some part of him knew he should drag in a deep breath before the shock set i—

A wall of off-white exploded out of the center of the steering column and hurled him back against the seat—it felt like he’d been fucking slapped everywhere at _once_ , like belly-flopping from fifty-feet up; burnt-numb all over—

The airbag deflated like a fucking parachute when the wind died and fell to hanging there tragically from the steering wheel.

He couldn’t—

 _breathecouldn’tbreathe_ —

He swallowed hard, then harder, and glanced into his rearview; the driver of the other car was silhouetted relatively clearly in their seat, and it looked like they were moving—so they must’ve been okay—

What the fuck were you supposed to do?  Pull out of the fucking way, right?  Other people were going to need to use this street whether or not he was fucking reeling from life’s latest one-two punch, more literally even than fucking usual.

He gritted his teeth and sucked air in through them, trying to force it down his throat; his head kept fucking teetering—like being drunk, only less fun in every possible fucking way, obviously, so really not like being drunk at all, and…

For a long second, the contours of the street ahead of him swam before his eyes, tracing hazy half-circle trajectories around the places that they should have been.  He coaxed another breath into his chest, blinked hard, and looked intently at the road.

Gingerly, he pushed his foot at the gas and drew his poor shuddering Civic off to the side of the street, where he nudged it up against the curb and stopped.  He pulled the parking brake and killed the engine, and…

Fucking… license and registration and insurance and… but first he had to make sure the other fucking asshole was okay—

The driver’s side door opened fine, so apparently his car hadn’t taken enough of a beating for the metal to bend this far up.  He wasn’t sure if that qualified as a good thing or not in this particular case, and he was too preoccupied with planting both feet on the pavement as carefully as he could to make that call—he wasn’t sure they were going to take his weight; his vision kept _tilting_ , and the wet heat sliding down his cheek was definitely blood running from his fucking forehead.

Too many fucking things happening at once; too much to process; too much to _do_ —

He tugged his left sleeve down and lifted his hand up and pressed the cloth against the part of his forehead that was starting to throb and sting and make various other indications that it was almost certainly the source of the blood dribbling into his eye.  Needed to put pressure on it or some shit.  Once he made sure the other person wasn’t any worse off, he could think about more specific avenues of wound-management, like trying to close the fucking thing; had he thrown scotch tape into his laptop bag in the lab, or was that a vivid hallucination compounded by the head trauma and the bewilderment and…?

He braced his right arm against the frame of his Civic, walking himself along like it was a banister on a steep staircase or some shit.  The fucking Lexus had done a cute sort of accordion number right towards the front, and one of the headlights had gotten smashed right the fuck out, but there wasn’t any obvious noxious black smoke pouring up from either vehicle’s engine, and the driver’s side door was opening, so hopefully the dumbass who’d hit him couldn’t have gotten hurt too badly, and…

“Hey,” he called, sounding half-hopeful and half-strangled to his own ears, as one long leg unfolded itself out of the car, followed by another.  No visible injuries yet—that was good.  “You okay?”

Fluidly, the driver ducked out of the car and stood.

It was—

Kimblee.

It was fucking _Kimblee_ ; fucking _Kimblee_ had fucking rear-ended him at a stop sign out of fucking nowhere _two blocks from Al’s new place_ —

This couldn’t be happening.  It _couldn’t_.  This was a fucking—dream.  Nightmare.  The light was tricking him; it was some other graceful fucking sleazebag with long black hair swept back except the two sections framing his angular face; it was some _other_ fucking monster of a man with eyes so fucking blue they still looked pale even in the dark—

“Well,” the voice he’d been trying for years now to scrub out from his fucking psyche said, and the slow curl of amusement in the words twisted up the corner of that smart fucking mouth.  “Good evening, Edward.  It’s been a while.”

Ed listened to the dry rasp of the breath sliding in and out of him as he stood there fucking rooted to the spot.  He felt like a statue, like a robot, like a shell, like a—

Corpse.

Like a dead man on his fucking feet, heart stopped, muscles frozen, blood vessels severed up and down.

“You hit me,” he said, stupidly, and it came out thick and slow and tremulous.

“You’re bleeding,” Kimblee said, gesturing smoothly.  “That’s going to need stitches.”

“It’s fine,” Ed managed through his numb fucking lips.

“It’s not,” Kimblee said.  “Let me s—”

He stepped forward, and Ed flinched away from him hard and _fast_ , and—

His shoulder had been pulsing with a series of fucking warning shots that he’d filed away as secondary to the head wound, but recoiling against his Civic set it on fire.

“Come on,” Kimblee said, briskly now, like he was talking to a fucking _kid_ ; and he was getting closer and closer, but Ed couldn’t—there wasn’t anywhere to run—

The cold was so fucking deep—so fucking deep in his blood and his guts and his bones that everything had frosted over; his veins were ice, and his stomach was a fucking snowbank; he couldn’t fight it—

“You need to go to the E.R.,” Kimblee said, and his hand settled on Ed’s shoulder, and the fucking _horror_ of it sliced through him even colder than the fucking rest—

Shit, _fuck_ —his heart was starting to jitter around like a fucking pinball, ricocheting through his ribcage, rippling underneath his skin—

“D-don’t—” he choked out.

“Don’t be childish,” Kimblee said, and for a long second the flare of _rage_ choked Ed worse than the thundering of his heart.

He hadn’t come this fucking far to be talked to like—

Fuck it, and fuck the quickening rasp of his own breath; he forced his knees to raise him and pushed past Kimblee to get to the driver’s side of his car—dropped in, regretted that when the black swirled in _close_ and only barely let him go, and took his keys out of the ignition.  He pulled himself upright again using the door for leverage, then slammed it and locked it and shoved the keys into his pocket again.  If Kimblee was going to drag him off somewhere and murder him, he didn’t want his laptop and his NIH grant app ending up at the bottom of whatever fucking ditch his body landed in.

Swiping the latest swell of blood out of his eye was apparently too abrupt a movement for his tormented fucking brain, since he wavered again—hard this time, suffused by that dangerous floaty lightness that could tip over into unconsciousness before you had a chance to blink.

“You’re probably concussed,” Kimblee said, and the long, pale fingers reaching out to him from the fucking dark made Ed’s stomach tighten, and that—

Made all of it that much fucking worse—made his heart pound harder, swifter, up in the back of his throat one second and the pit of his guts the next; made the shaking run backwards up from his fingertips to his forearms to his shoulders to his fucking _jaw_ —

He flattened his right palm against the closest car window and held the other over his eyes—even the dim fucking orange streetlamps were too fucking much; Kimblee’s unholy fucking too-bright goddamn _headlights_ were still on—well, the one that hadn’t smashed was—well—

This was not a coincidence.

He didn’t know how long it had been coming—didn’t know when Kimblee had fucking turned him up again, but it wouldn’t have been hard to find him.  It had never been hard, and now he had half a dozen more public fucking profiles on the university website; he had a homepage for his lab with a stupid staged photo of him trying to look smart and professional and together and shit—

He pressed the side of his head in against the cold glass of the window and tried to focus—tried to breathe; tried to make his body slow down and behave and cooperate and work fucking _with_ him for once.

What the fuck was he going to do?  He couldn’t run like this—he wouldn’t make it five fucking steps before he went down hard and maybe didn’t ever get up.  And even if he’d had the balance, or the strength, he couldn’t beat the shit out of Kimblee and be done with it; it was still assault and fucking battery when they deserved it, if they hadn’t unequivocally threatened you or whatever it was—like retaliating against a schoolyard bully and landing your own ass in suspension.  Kimblee knew his way around the fucking law, in and out of the corners, through the loopholes.  Ed couldn’t make any fucking move that might be construed as antagonistic.

Fancy fucking that—his fucking hands were tied.

Breathe.  He had to breathe.  Everything else would fucking come later; he had to—

Kimblee couldn’t know where Al lived—could he?  Not yet.  Not unless he’d been tailing Ed _close_ for a long time, and Ed was paranoid enough to have noticed that, right?

Jesus fucking Christ, he _couldn’t_ , could he—?

Well—if he didn’t—bless this fucking cesspit of a suburb and its billion identical cookie-cutter houses; bless the stupid unmarked mailboxes and the endless cul-de-sacs.  The fucker could try a hundred houses at random and never get anywhere near Al and Win and their stupid kitten.

Right?

Kimblee’s fingers curled into Ed’s sleeve—just tight enough that he could yank himself loose if he really worked at it; just tight enough that he’d have to go overboard and look fucking dramatic if he wanted to shake off the unwelcome touch.

“Come on, Edward,” Kimblee said.  “My car’s still running.  I’ll take you to the emergency room.”

Ed couldn’t believe the admittedly pretty paltry contents of his stomach were still hanging out in his GI tract instead of hurling themselves down onto the pavement.  “N-no, it’s fine, I’ll—”

“Ambulances are expensive,” Kimblee said, and his voice kept getting softer but—colder.  “Just get in the car.  It’ll be fine.”

Ed was going to die.

This fucker was going to fucking murder him while he was staggering around holding his hand up to his bleeding forehead, and nobody was _ever_ going to find his decimated remains.

Pulling on his sleeve to lead him, Kimblee drew him over around the hood of the stupid fucking Lexus, opened the passenger door, and released his arm—like there was any fucking choice when Ed could barely stand; like there was anywhere to go with Kimblee standing there, blocking his egress, raising an eyebrow like Ed’s hesitation was some kind of histrionic little game.

He got into the car.

This was it.  Wasn’t it?  Fucker was going to cut him up into a thousand pieces and sprinkle them across a field of Venus flytraps, and Al would cry and cry and—

Kimblee settled in the driver’s seat, slammed his door, and had the grace not to put on the fucking child locks for good measure.  Maybe if they started heading for the city dump, Ed could just jump out on the highway and hit the shoulder of the road at a good James Bond roll and crawl off before Kimblee could turn around; maybe he’d find a farmhouse with some charitable old guy who’d drive him back to safety in a tractor, and—

“I can text you pictures of my insurance information later,” Kimblee said.

The real shitty thing was that every time Ed’s heart started banging harder, his head spun faster; and then knowing that he was getting progressively unsteadier made the panic worse, and… Vicious fucking cycle shit.

Kimblee was trying to fucking trap him into responding positively on instinct—which would require him to admit that he’d blocked the shitbag’s number in the first place, or to commit to unblocking it in a damn hurry, or to give up his fucking email address as a compromise.

Fuck that.   _Fuck_ that, and fuck Kimblee for thinking he was still too stupid to see it.

“My phone’s been having problems with texts lately,” Ed said, and it was funny how lies didn’t even stick in your teeth when you spat them out the right way.  He trained his eyes on the dashboard as the roads changed; the flashes of ambient lights slipping by his window made the vertigo way worse.  “I could just—t-take a picture right now.  ’S’it in the glove?”

He managed to keep his voice flat and casual except for the little tremor, but his blood was _roiling_ , and the beat of it in his brain felt like the pull of a tide—every wave dragged his whole body back and forth, and if he didn’t fucking drown in the dark edges, it’d be a fucking miracle—

“It might be at home,” Kimblee said.

“I’ll call,” Ed said.  “What’s the company?”

He was not a fucking kid.

He was not a fucking _kid_ anymore, and he could handle himself, and he could handle this slimy fucking bastard, and he didn’t _have_ to freak the fuck out.  He could do this.  He could take it.

He pressed his eyes shut tight and held his closed fist to his forehead and focused intently on breathing slow.

“Oddly enough,” Kimblee said, and there was the singsong voice Ed heard sometimes in the echoes of his fucking nightmares, “I honestly can’t recall.  I’ll let you know.”

Funny, too, how much an offer could sound like a fucking threat.

“Great,” Ed said in the most acidically sardonic tone he could muster while he was bleeding out and losing little pieces of his mind.  His thoughts just kept—fracturing, splintering; and ideas slipped loose like fragments of an iceberg and drifted off and melted clean away.

One stuck around, bobbing in the frigid current near enough to grasp:

Where the fuck were they going?

He winched one eye open and tried to make it focus on the world outside the windshield—they were getting onto the fucking highway, which wasn’t… which…

He dragged his brain back out into the agonizing real world that was currently trying to stab it from every fucking side.

“Take Meridian,” he said.  “Sacred Heart has an urgent care clinic.”

Kimblee glanced over at him, and Ed could _feel_ it—the hostility, radiating out for one long damn second; the resentment that Ed had trampled on whatever diabolical fucking plan he’d been unfurling.  Probably he’d been plotting to drive Ed to an E.R. in Canada or some shit.  _Well, I didn’t specify_ which _emergency room_ —

It was only that one fucking second, though, and then Kimblee had himself under control again, and even the slightest damn trace of readable emotion disappeared.

“Ah, yes,” Kimblee said, in a calm voice, like it wasn’t the most meaningless fucking response in the English language.

Ed leaned back against the seat—fine fucking leather, as always—and concentrated on trying to stem the slow trickle of blood from his stupid face.  He had no idea now how much he’d lost; obviously it didn’t seem like a whole pint, and you could hand that out for free and be fine, but estimating volume was hard enough when it wasn’t flowing very slowly from your own damn injuries.

He wished he’d brought his fucking laptop after all, even at the risk of bleeding on it—it would’ve given him something to cling to instead of sitting here with his left hand hand pressed over the gash on his head, elbow angled awkwardly as fuck to avoid grazing Kimblee’s arm, and his right curled in as tight to his body as he could get it.  And who knew how fucking long it’d take them to find someone to stitch him up?  Maybe he could’ve gotten some grant work done.  Maybe he could’ve played Tetris.  Maybe he could’ve IMed Al for fucking help while Kimblee wasn’t looking; oh, _God_ , he was in the middle of the fucking spider-web, splayed out and fucking helpless, just fucking _waiting_ for the fangs—

Kimblee took the exit for Meridian.

Ed almost fucking collapsed from the sheer relief, because the bastard hadn’t flicked his fucking blinker, so there wasn’t any warning, which was utterly his fucking style—

But he couldn’t show any of his cards.  Not to Kimblee.  He had to be careful; he had to be _so_ careful; maybe if he was—maybe if he played the game; maybe if he played it fucking _well_ enough—

Just sharing air with this fucking—creature—made him so nervous it felt like there were tiny knives and needles dancing everywhere beneath his skin.

“How have you been?” Kimblee asked.

And what the fuck was Ed supposed to say to that?  _“Great, for a while; and then good; and then struggling but okay; and then last night I threw it all the fuck away because I’m a fucking idiot, but I guess you knew that”_?

You were supposed to get revenge on your shitty exes by having a better life than them, weren’t you?

Ed could’ve sworn Winry had once said something like that.

Then again, Winry had once said a hell of a lot of things, many of which you wouldn’t want to repeat in polite company, let alone follow as advice.

“Fine,” Ed said, as tonelessly as he could when his voice wanted to tremble so badly that he had to swallow twice to steady it.  That was good, though— _“fine”_ was good; _“fine”_ the most pointedly noncommittal answer humanly possible, which was better than fucking Kimblee deserved.

Were the streets in this part of town always this damn dark, or did city lighting just spontaneously flicker out when Kimblee’s black hole presence moved into the vicinity?

The way Ed’s stupid heart kept racing made him feel like a prey animal—and he was, wasn’t he?  Quick, shallow breath and darting eyes and everything so tense he’d long since started shaking.  None of this was fucking helping with the ongoing trickle of blood from his fucking head.  How much had it been by now?  They were probably going to ask him; what if he guesstimated wrong, and they underestimated the seriousness of it, and he passed out on the fucking germ-laden linoleum, then—

He had to fucking _breathe_.

The other question—maybe the worse one—

How long was Kimblee going to stick around?

Was he just going to toss Ed out in the fucking parking lot, or was he going to hover and linger and look over Ed’s shoulder and watch with that terrible fucking gleam in his fucking eyes while some doctor stuck a needle through Ed’s skin—?

What if he was faking Ed out anyway, and they weren’t going to urgent care at all?  What if they were going directly to some shadowy fucking abandoned warehouse where nobody would hear him s—

“I suppose it’s difficult to believe,” Kimblee said, in that same soft, delicate, pseudo-surprised voice he’d always whipped out in the beginning, “but I’ve missed you.”

He was full of _shit_ , and they both knew it.

Maybe he’d missed the game.  Maybe he’d missed Ed’s particular brand of panic—the special way his eyes widened when the desperation to please metamorphosed into something more like fear.  Maybe he missed having an easy target.  Maybe he missed how earnestly his little puppet had played along.

No way— _no_ way—had he missed Ed as a human being.

Kimblee didn’t register that other people were human beings.  Other people were a catalogue of possibilities for pain and weaknesses, no more, no less.

“You’re right,” Ed said, and maybe the words fucking wavered on the way out, but he _said_ them.  “I don’t believe you.”

Silence for a second, and Ed’s heart slammed once, twice, three times; and he fixed his gaze on the street sign dangling by the stoplight that had just turned red.  Kimblee stopped the car and tapped one fingertip against the steering wheel.

“Ah,” Kimblee said, so lightly that the sound barely made it across the center console to Ed’s ringing ears.  “That’s a shame.”

How did he do that?  How did he drop those icy fucking boulders of pure guilt directly into the pit of Ed’s stomach even after all this fucking time—after so much hard-won healing?

Ed had been so damn sure he’d gotten past it.  He’d been so damn sure it was over, and now—

All of the same fucking torment—tiny little tendrils of ivy growing everywhere in fast-motion, threading through his ribcage, cinching in around his lungs, climbing up his throat—

And the unrelenting urgency of his fucking heartbeat trying to drive him over the precipice into panic.

The red disc overheard winked out, and the green one lit.

“Things change,” Kimblee said, drawing forward, and then they were off again, gliding through the unsettlingly empty fucking streets.

Things did.  Sometimes people did, too.

But not the kind of things that made a person torture someone else and _like_ it.

Not the kind of things that blackened you on the inside like that; not the kind of things that made your enjoyment of other people’s hurt and confusion—your enjoyment of deliberately _creating_ their hurt and confusion—more important to you than any other aspect of their life.

People like that were lost forever.  They didn’t turn over a new leaf and wind up with one that was clean and compassionate; they didn’t wake up one morning and understand the error of their fucking ways.  They didn’t just up and erase the years and years of practiced destruction.

That didn’t _happen_.

And people like that didn’t deserve so much as the benefit of the fucking doubt.

Right?

“Yeah,” Ed said.  If he sounded aloof—disinterested, unaffected, anything but terrified and quaking—maybe Kimblee would lose the goddamn scent.  “I guess so.”

How much fucking further could it be to Sacred Heart, anyway?  A reckless part of Ed wanted to turn on the radio—drown out the prickly, calculated conversation with some shitty pop music; distract Kimblee’s formidable attention from every goddamn detail of his posture and his movements and his expressions and his speech.  Because he knew—he knew Kimblee was damn smart in too many ways, but that was the scariest one.  Kimblee knew people; he read people—clinically, like a surgeon, so that he could pick them apart.  Not to help.  Not to understand.  To put the knife in deeper.  To get the blood running hot all over his hands.

That was the thrill for him, wasn’t it?  The chase, and his teeth sinking into the throat of something helpless.  The instant that his subject recognized that its life, its universe, its safety was in his grasp, and at his mercy.

A goal that simple should’ve made him predictable, but it didn’t, because there were a thousand routes towards it.  There were a thousand ways to make somebody bleed.

And Ed was thin right now—paper-thin and fragile with it; worn almost fucking through.  Raw.  Shaken.

Vulnerable.

Kimblee would smell it, and know Ed knew he did.  And Ed had always fucking sucked at chess.

“You do have insurance, don’t you?” Kimblee asked.

“Yeah,” Ed said.  His heart wasn’t even fucking beating anymore: just vibrating, shuddering around inside his stupid chest, hurling itself at the walls, faster and faster by the fucking second; and it was a _creeping_ thing sometimes—the panic was.  Sometimes it crawled instead of leaping, but you couldn’t stop it even if you watched the spread of shadows from the very fucking start.  “Allstate.”

“Not for the car,” Kimblee said, and the hint of the condescending smile in his voice felt like fucking chastisement, and that shouldn’t have stung, but— “Health insurance.  Are you still insured by the school?”

There was fucking magic in it—in the way he talked.  One of the highest-rated universities in the world was Ed’s _school_ ; with just the words he picked, he could minimize Ed’s fucking experiences and emotions in the time it took to ask what sounded like an ordinary question.  That was incredible, wasn’t it?

Fucking incredible, too, how Ed hadn’t been able to see any of it from the inside, but now the silhouette was just so fucking crisp against the wall.

“Yeah,” he said.  “They hired me on.”  He waited, gazing out the windshield; staring at the side of the fucker’s face to monitor reactions would’ve made it too obvious that he was hoping for one.  “As a professor.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have volunteered it, but it wasn’t like a single Google search wouldn’t have sold him out anyway.

“Did they,” Kimblee said, sounding—what?  Vaguely surprised?  Distantly fucking pleased?  “How nice.  Congratulations.”

Ed’s heart pounded, and his head pounded, and it occurred to him that he would have given up a couple of fingers not to be here right now.  “Thanks.”

And there—

Blessed fucking neon, pun entirely subsidiary to the import of the words _Sacred Heart_ blaring—in crappy, 80s-worthy colors—out of the muddled night ahead.  There was even a helpful arrow labeled _Urgent Care_ so that Kimblee couldn’t pull any shit… unless, of course, he’d been planning all along to drive around the back of the building, cut Ed’s throat, mutilate his corpse, and toss it into a biohazard bin, in which case Ed was fucked either way, so it didn’t really matter, did it?

Maybe Ed could spare a hand from stopping the blood from his forehead long enough to reach for his seatbelt release buckle if it came to that.

The thought was like an ice pick somebody kept stabbing into his skull; he couldn’t stop his breath from hitching, stuttering, going jagged at the edges as it warped his fucking brain—

 _He’s going to kill me.  He’s going to kill me.  He’s going to drive into a dark part of the parking lot and get out a knife and cut me open, and I’m going to get to watch my guts pour out all over this nice fucking leather, fifty feet from the fucking hospital, and he’s going to_ wait _as long as he can before he puts me out of my fucking misery.  He’s going to kill me; he’s going to kill me; he’s—_

“You can just drop me off,” he forced out around the bubble of fucking terror swelling in his throat.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kimblee said.

He pulled neatly into an empty parking spot twenty steps from the backlit glass doors.

“Don’t move,” he said.

He killed the engine, got out, and strode swiftly around the jacked-up hood of the car—but of course Ed wasn’t fucking listening; he fought his way out of the seatbelt and had his door halfway open by the time Kimblee grabbed the edge of it.  That same sour-annoyed expression that Ed remembered from the time before flitted across his face, but he wiped it away as he drew the door further open and held out a hand.

“I’m fine,” Ed said, which—

Was kind of hilarious, actually, in a stupid sort of way.

But the point was that Kimblee could go to _hell_ —which, incidentally, was where he was from—because Ed would pass out and break his face on the asphalt before he took that fucker’s hand.

He stuck one foot out of the car, followed it with the other, slid forward until they both touched the pavement, clung onto the doorframe with his free hand, and levered himself upright.  The world wheeled around a little bit, but then it stayed still.  So—fine.  Yeah.  Just like he’d said.

Other than the fact that the anxiety was rising like a frigid fucking tide, and the brush of his shirt collar against his neck felt like fingers closing around his throat, and the patter of his heartbeat was so erratic it made his breathing erratic—on top of strangled—and—

His ankles went super-weird and fucked-up and uncoordinated all at once, and they tangled with each other as he tried to take a step, and his whole balance flung sideways—

And for once—for the first and probably last time in his fucking life—it was nice that Kimblee had cobra reflexes, and his striking instincts always speared the target.

The target in this case was Ed’s elbow, and the end result was that the whole experience probably worsened the whiplash, but it avoided the addition of roadrash on his face, because Kimblee caught him right before he fell.

The annoyed face was back— _snide_ ; that was the word.  The rotten fucking bastard lovechild of anger and sheer condescension.

Kimblee righted Ed—and brushed at his sleeve, which made his fucking skin crawl more than ever.  “Would it kill you to accept assistance once in a while?”

Ed set his jaw and closed his eyes while the lamps over the parking spaces wavered.  Kimblee’s fucking fingers clenching around his arm felt like a branding iron—like a bear trap.  “I dunno.  Why take the chance?”

Kimblee’s grip on him didn’t loosen, and his heart didn’t slow, but the sloshing feeling in his stomach like he was on the deck of a freaking ship sort of went away, and he risked cracking his eyes open again.

It was an uncharacteristically not-assholish move: Kimblee had actually parked relatively close to the doors to the clinic.

But they still looked like they were a million fucking miles away.

“I don’t think this is the time to try to be funny,” Kimblee said, and that one crossed from snide right over into snippy.

“I don’t think that this is the time,” Ed said, “to fucking argue with the guy who’s bleeding.”

Kimblee stared at him.

It occurred to Ed—suddenly, and maybe more than a little bit belated—that Kimblee had never really gotten a taste of what a little _shit_ Ed could be.  Ed had been so fucking scared back then—so fucking terrified that he’d die unloved and unwanted and utterly alone if he let anybody see the snarky, crabby, weird-ass nerd kid he really was.  He’d been more or less honest with Greg, and that had fucked him over; with Kimblee, he’d dwindled into a meek little fucking shadow of himself in his heedless desperation to please.

Good fucking riddance.

Kimblee shut up, but he didn’t let go.  Shittily enough, Ed wasn’t sure he could make it to the lobby without the support—frankly, he didn’t especially like his odds for the next five steps without that fucker’s arm to lean on.

Jesus fucking Christ; he still couldn’t believe this was happening, and he wanted nothing in the world more than for it to be over.

“Slow down,” Kimblee said as Ed tried to speed up this part of the program by lengthening his stride.  “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“Well, golly fucking gee,” Ed said.  “We can’t have _that_ , can we?”

“As an act of charity,” Kimblee said, in a voice like a hacked-off wire—jagged, twisting, spitting sparks; “I’m going to chalk the foul mood and your incredible rudeness up to the head injury.”

Ed’s guts—

—collapsed in on themselves, like a burning house; like the whole fucking structure was giving way.

All of the trepidation and the frantic bids for attention that had used to consume his interactions with this man had festered over time into a searing spear of _anger_ , but if there was one thing that could pry the weapon right out of his hand—

The first and truest and most important goal of his entire existence had been to cut the selfishness out of himself once and for all.

He was acting like a spoiled fucking kid.

Yeah, it was Kimblee’s _fault_.  Yeah, Kimblee was a piece of shit.  But if he was genuinely trying to help here—whether or not he’d changed profoundly in the intervening years; whether or not he’d somehow turned over enough new leaves to shed the worst of what he was before—if he was offering a hand in kindness, and Ed was snapping at it like an untrained fucking animal—

He was better than that.  Wasn’t he?  Mom had raised him better.  He had to be.

He drew in a slow deep breath and let it out as gently as he could with his ribcage still rattling like this.

“Sorry,” he said.

He could feel Kimblee watching him, but he didn’t want to look.  Besides, if he took his eyes off that distant pair of automatic doors, they might just disappear.

“I suppose it’s understandable,” Kimblee said.

Ed took another, deeper breath.  Was it the oxygen deprivation that was making him so fucking dizzy, or the sudden influx of it now that he was breathing better?  Probably it was just the regular old blood loss; probably it was the blunt force trauma and the likely concussion; probably…

Probably they were going to get there someday if they just _kept walking_ , right?

Fuck.

His feet felt like anvils hung from the ankles; he couldn’t believe he hadn’t tripped again by now.  One step, one fucking weight swung at a time—eventually they’d hit the curb and then the mat and then the doors and then the tile; that was just _physics_ —

He kept getting confused trying to figure out whether the vertigo eased off or increased when he kept his head up; was looking at the ancient-gum-spattered pavement worse?  He couldn’t really clock the speed of the pounding of his pulse because the noise of it was distractingly loud.

“I mean it,” he said, and his whole battered body thrummed with it—emotional muscle memory; how the fuck about that?  He needed Kimblee to listen, to take him seriously, to believe him—he _needed_ it.  The urgency in the clench of his chest surprised him, and then it sickened him, because he’d thought… He’d tried so hard to get past it; worked so hard to change; resolved so firmly not to grovel for approval ever again—

“Hm,” Kimblee said.

He knew it was stupid.  That was the worst part; he _knew_ —

And it still struck him like a backhand across the cheekbone.

Maybe it was the dismissal of it—maybe that was the critical part of how Kimblee had always strung Ed along like a fucking pull toy.  Maybe it was just the fact that Ed had been ignored and underestimated and shut down and pushed away so many fucking times in his life that an offer of attention that faded to disinterest had cut him to the bone faster than any outright cruelty ever could.

People who just talked shit were simple.  But the people who fed you sweet-tasting poison _real_ slow—

Those were the ones that merited your fear.

His heavy fucking feet carried him over the chipped red paint on the curb—just barely—and the automatic doors shuddered open in front of them like the parting of the Red fucking Sea.  Kimblee was still performing a deft maneuver that somehow combined holding Ed up by one arm and basically dragging him by his sleeve.

Finally stumbling up to the front desk was like reaching the finish line in some ungodly sort of three-legged race.  Well—four-legged, and one-souled, so that sort of made up for it, right?

“Good evening,” the woman at the desk said, which was sort of hilarious.  She didn’t even blink at the fact that Ed probably looked like something out of a second-rate zombie movie—staggering around with his hand covered in blood, likely paler than death itself under the lousy fluorescent lights.  “Stitches, I take it.”  She pulled out a form and started checking boxes.  “Anything else?”

Ed kind of wanted to say _You guys have a litmus test for heartbreak?_ , but Kimblee was still fucking holding onto his arm, and it was taking most of his willpower to balance staying conscious and not just shuddering until his bones dropped out of his skin.

“Not really,” he said.

She half-nodded.  “Do you have an ID and your insurance card?”

“Yeah,” he said automatically, and then he experienced a glorious moment of frozen panic as he wondered whether he _did_.  Did he _have_ his wallet?  What about his fucking phone?  He’d been too paranoid to take it out in front of Kimblee in case—something; in case some kind of information was visible; in case it sold him out for a liar; in case there was a text from Roy, and he just finally fucking shattered, or the bastard saw it and turned it into a weapon right off the bat—

He swallowed, swallowed again, took a shaky breath, and shoved his non-bloody hand into the pocket of his slacks.  Wrangling his wallet out was way more of a fucking project than it should’ve been, but eventually he managed to fish it free and smack it down on the countertop.  By the time he started fumbling in the stack of cards he’d shoved into the little plastic pocket in the middle, Kimblee was—

Moving—

Around him—

And then reaching for it, and Ed’s adrenaline spiked like a motherfucking _rocket_ , and he snatched it back.

“Edward,” Kimblee said, and then warm fingertips caught his chin, and that same old talented fucking hand was cradle-grasping his jaw, and—

And the worst part was, there was a second where he—

 _Liked_ it.  Where the thrill felt good.

His stomach twisted up so violently that he choked on his next breath, and the one after that brought an edge of bile up to the back of his throat, and all of it made it impossible to fucking speak—

“You must be concussed after all,” Kimblee was saying, looking into one of his eyes and then the other.  “Relax.  Let me.”

And Ed didn’t fucking want to ‘let him’; Ed didn’t fucking want to let him do _anything_ ; because one look at Ed’s driver’s license would give him Roy’s address.

Oh, God, he had to change—

 _All_ of his fucking mail was still heading for Roy’s doorstep; he’d agonized for a week about whether to do it at the start, but Al had been giving up the lease on the old place, and a P.O. box had been way out of his budget, and the university mail service lost shit all the time—

Kimblee caught up his fucking wallet and started rifling through the cards.

Ed’s heart stuck; his breath stuck; both of them were jammed in his throat and fighting for the space; he couldn’t _move_ , and his head kept spinning like a carousel, and the lights made him dizzy, and the music was too loud—

“Here we are,” Kimblee said, setting Ed’s driver’s license crisply down on the counter; he followed it with the shittily-laminated insurance card that Ed had finally punched out of the little frame just last week—he’d waved it around, _Hey, guess I’m official now, clearly they spare no fucking expense, so do you think they’ll cover burning off my eyebrows?_ , and Roy had laughed and almost spilled his tea and begged Ed to protect his eyebrows, because they were “positively exquisite,” whatever the fuck that meant in eyebrow terms, and—

“Thank you,” the lady said, and she picked them both up and fanned them out and then started typing things into her computer, and Ed dragged a little bit of air in through the tiny portion of his esophagus that had remained accessible.  He couldn’t tell if Kimblee had done more than just glance at the front of either of them, but a glance would be enough for that fucking asshole; a glance would tell him everything, and he’d remember.

Ed watched the woman’s eyes flick back and forth between the cards and the computer screen, and then he watched her arm shift—

And reached out as she extended the cards again, before Kimblee could fucking move his hand.

“Thanks,” Ed said, grabbing his wallet up off of the counter, stuffing them back into the slot, and shoving it into his pocket.  She might have acknowledged it, but his head was just— _buzzing_ , and it was like there was an earthquake in the core of him, and the bedrock of his bones was splitting with the strain.

He could feel Kimblee’s fucking presence like the heat of a flame getting closer and closer and closer to his bare skin.

The lady was scribbling on his form.  “Go ahead and take a seat,” she said without looking up.  “We’ll call you when someone’s available.”

Funny how the _Urgent_ in _Urgent Care_ actually meant _Not urgent at all_ , but Ed figured beggars couldn’t fucking quibble with the semantics of their handouts.

“Thanks,” he said again, since that was the societally acceptable thing to do, and apparently even a head wound couldn’t knock it out of him.

The next societally acceptable maneuver was _not_ hissing aloud and whirling on Kimblee and putting a set of knuckles through his fucking teeth when he spread one long-fingered hand on Ed’s far shoulder, arm draping lightly against Ed’s back.

That one was a lot fucking harder.

There was clearly a full-on French Revolution, down-with-the-king, guillotine-everyone revolt going on amongst Ed’s internal organs, because they were all over the place.  Maybe they’d finally gotten sick of their mediocre care and started shuffling themselves around to see if he’d treat them better if his lungs shriveled up and pressed themselves against the front of his ribcage; and his stomach climbed up and wrapped itself around his heart and squeezed, and the pair of them started banging around like a pair of fucking hooligans; and presumably there was a raucous house party going on in the general area of his liver and his kidneys and his pancreas and shit, because everything just felt _wrong_.

“Stop touching me,” he said, in the calmest, quietest fucking voice he could choke out.

He could hear the slow-snaking curve of the smile.  “No.”

A breath shuddered into him, and then back out.  His nerves weren’t exactly trustworthy right now, sparking and shimmering at fucking random like they were, but he was pretty sure the gash on his head had stopped actively bleeding.  He lowered his hand and curled it into a fist.  They were getting close to the line of pale plastic chairs, so that he could wait in extra agony for this place to fix the agonies he’d brought in.

There was nobody here to hear him.  No fucking witnesses but the receptionist; nobody to take his fucking side.

He swallowed.  “ _Please_ stop t—”

“How’s this?” Kimblee asked, arm slithering against the back of his neck; both hands settled on his shoulders, and then one drew down to his elbow, and together they guided him down into one of the chairs—pushing, but not too hard.

Ed was so fucking tense it jarred his spine enough to make his eyes water all the fucking same.

“I should be going,” Kimblee said, gazing down at him with unfuckingmistakable satisfaction.

And Ed—

Didn’t know how to fight it anymore; didn’t know what ground was stable enough to make a stand on; and, if the fucker was finally leaving of his own volition, couldn’t find the strength to care.

“Your car gonna be okay?” he asked.

Kimblee shrugged.

“My car’s in the shop,” he said, gesturing out towards the parking lot.  “That’s a rental.”

Ed’s brain whirred.  The processing circuits of it churned.  Did that mean— _could_ that mean—?

Had Kimblee fucking planned this down to the intimate details from the very start?

“Oh,” Ed’s voice said stupidly to fill the silence.  “Okay.”

“Take care of yourself,” Kimblee said.

That would not fucking compute, but scrunching up his forehead to try to decipher it made Ed’s head ache worse.

Kimblee leaned down, reached forward, and dragged the pad of his thumb through the damp smear of blood on Ed’s cheek.  He stood, smirked, and licked off the smudge.

“Waste not, want not,” he said.

Ed’s mind went blank—went _void_ ; went empty, searing, roaring white.

“What?” he croaked.

Kimblee grinned like a fucking jackal.

Then he turned on his heel and sauntered out the doors, waving over one shoulder.

Ed sunk into the chair and stared at the ceiling and tried very, very fucking hard to remember how to breathe.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello and welcome to NINJA UPDATE, which could also be called LIAR UPDATE, since the latter is the primary reason we're here. XD 
> 
> I accidentally lied to you guys last week, because apparently I can't navigate my own fanfics well enough to tell one chapter from another! :B  This is not, in fact, the chapter where stuff starts to suck less.  That's next chapter.  So I'm giving you this chapter today, and that chapter tomorrow, such that the less-suck will still be on schedule; there's just an extra update in the middle. ^^
> 
> You will probably want to leave yourself a nice chunk of reading time if you're planning to wait until tomorrow and burn through the whole thing, though!  It's………… a lot. :'D
> 
> In the long run, this is a good thing, because it'll make me trying to post the pile of nonsense half-ideas I have for [Roy/Ed week](http://royedweek.tumblr.com/post/162843446491/royed-week-is-coming-up-this-year-royed-week)… hopefully… slightly… less… disastrous.  Hopefully. :x
> 
>  
> 
> **RECAP:** Present-day!Ed (whose timeline so far is available [here](http://tierfal.tumblr.com/post/163573276684/im-a-bit-confused-about-the-timeline-for-the), if it helps!) is trying to find his feet and figure out his own feelings before he talks to Roy. Past-tense!Ed is sitting in the waiting room at an urgent care clinic, because he just got rear-ended by Kimblee on his way back to Al's and Winry's place, where he's been crashing miserably on the couch after walking out on Roy.
> 
>  

One might think he’d reserve Sunday for discovering the cultural nuances of the English pub scene—that is, if one didn’t know him at all.  If he’d had a different life.  If he was a different person altogether, at which point he probably wouldn’t be here right now anyway.

Instead, all of the infinitesimal factors have converged to see him dragging his bleary self and all of his marginally less-bleary luggage onto the Tube to take the Jubilee line to the Victoria, which will land him at King’s Cross, where he’s going to catch a train to Edinburgh.

Roy tried to coax him into leaving a day or two completely open—free of obligations; free of travel; free of seminars; devoid entirely of plans.  He saw the logic of it, then and now.  It would’ve encouraged him to explore a place he might not have picked out in a travel guide, and that probably would have landed him somewhere wonderful and unexpected and positively new.

But, as he’d explained, you can’t _really_ go to fucking England and not milk at least a little bit of the Harry Potter potential from it, and taking a King’s Cross train to the city she wrote the book in makes a pretty good start on that.

Roy laughed—a lot, probably more than it merited; Ed’s not funny and never has been; Roy’s just biased and possibly a little bit deranged—and relented on the condition that Ed took at least one selfie in front of a sign with the city name.  _Ed in burgh_.  Pretty good shit.

Everything feels so wrong now that he has no idea where the rubble ends and the foundations begin.  How the fuck are you supposed to build on that?

His shoulder aches.  His brain’s a foggy fucking mess.  And his heart has a lot in common with both.

He left himself some extra time to allow for delays of any variety that the world might see fit to throw at him, so he winds up at the station early.  It’s—good, in its way.  Being early is good.  Al would have a good fucking laugh if he knew Ed was thinking that; Ed’s always professed to be of the mind that time spent loitering around waiting for shit is time irrevocably wasted.  But that’s the trick, really—he’s not planning to waste this time; he’s going to use it.

Specifically, he’s going to get some tea and sit down with his laptop anywhere there’s space and a view of the barrier between platforms nine and ten.

He’s not the only sucker, either; they have a little themed shop and a freaking _photo op_ with a fake half-cart stuck to the wall.  If Al or Roy was here—

They’re not.

It’s just him.

Him, and his laptop, and the email that he needs to send.

A quick triage of all of the work-related messages that have come in since last night assuages some of the general swirl of ambient anxiety; nothing seems to be actively on fire in the lab, or at least nothing that couldn’t be covered up before the university sent a public safety notice about it.

He’s not going to consider the not-especially-outlandish possibility that more disasters happen in lab when _he’s_ present, because that would cast preposterous aspersions on his devoted lifelong commitment to health and safety and all that good shit.  Everyone knows he’s never once in his life foregone a lab coat or some other piece of bulky, obnoxious safety equipment just because he was so damned excited to get an experiment going, after all.

The point is, no cataclysms have unfolded in his absence, so he can tab on over to his personal email and start shoving at the jagged-edged boulder that he was up and kicking at uselessly for half of the night last night.

He takes a deep breath, opens a new message, and types in the start of the address.  His email remembers enough holidays to autofill the rest.

_Hi, Gracia_ , he writes.  That looks stupid, but there isn’t time to quibble over what combination of clichéd salutation words might seem less ridiculous juxtaposed with the hunk of granite looming overhead.  _There’s really kind of no way to ease into this, and I know it’s not your problem at all, but at this point I’m a little desperate and you’re the only person I know who will really understand.  God, I’m sorry to spring this on you.  I mean that.  I’m sorry._

_I’m guessing you probably don’t know about this yet, since I only just heard about it last night, but I guess Roy’s flying out to DC to be a witness in Bradley’s trial for war crimes._

These words just don’t make _sense_.  They can’t be real; none of this can be real; there has to be a back door out of this fucking universe that leads to one with recognizable fucking shapes.

_That wouldn’t even be.  Okay, it sounds really really stupid to say “that wouldn’t even be a big deal” but it in itself isn’t the problem, I guess is my point.  The problem is that he told me about some of the shit that he did out there and I just don’t know what to do or how to deal with it or even how to process learning that about someone I thought I knew._

_And I guess that’s part of what’s so hard about it for me right now, is that I do know him, and he’s still himself, but everything’s different and it’s really fucking scary and I don’t know what to think._

_I hope it’s not too personal and I don’t want to pry or dredge up anything, that’s the LAST thing I want, but I thought maybe you might have some advice or something on how to cope with this.  And I’d really really appreciate it if you do.  I know you’re really busy and it’s really not your problem at all but any ideas you’ve got would help a lot.  I’m just so fucking lost right now._

_It’s absolutely okay if you’re swamped and don’t have time or anything, I totally understand!  Just figured it was worth a try._

_Hope everybody’s well and tell Elicia I bought her horrible souvenirs (they’re actually pretty cool though, or at least I hope they are)._

_Thank you for everything._

_—Ed_

Well, if nothing else, that’s nice and coherent and succinct and not pathetic at all.

He can’t do fucking anything right.

  


* * *

  


It’d be a bit of a fucking stretch to say he _wanted_ to make the phone call—more like he knew he had to, and at least it wasn’t like it could make this shit any worse.  That was the cold fucking comfort of having your cheek pressed to rock bottom, wasn’t it?

Convincing his shaky hands to fish out his phone and operate the touchscreen was more trouble than it ought to have been, but eventually he met with enough success to get the line ringing for his speed-dial.

Thank fucking Christ or somebody that it only rang once before it clicked.  Less time for the panic to spread through every capillary like the goddamn disease it was.

“Hi, Brother!” Al said.

“Hey, Al,” he managed, and the syllables almost sounded stable.

“Oh, my gosh,” Al said.  “What’s wrong?”

“It’s okay,” Ed said.  Fucking autopilot.  “I just—I need a favor.”

“Of course,” Al said softly.  “What’s going on?”

Ed tried to glance down the different avenues of possibility and figure out which path of conversation led to the smallest Al freakout.  His head hurt.  “I… got rear-ended.  Right near your house.  It’s not a big—it’s fine, but I’m at urgent care—”

“What?  Ed, which one?  I’ll be right—”

“It’s just stitches,” Ed said as fast as he could get his wobbly-ass mouth to cooperate.  “It’s really fine.  It’s just—my car’s still about a block away from your place, and my laptop’s in it, and… I locked it.”

Al was quiet for a fraction of a second.  “And your spare key is—”

“At Roy’s,” Ed said, and his throat went—squishy.  Gooey.  Something.

“Well, fuck that,” Winry’s voice cut in.  “I can break into that bad boy in fifteen seconds; nineties Hondas are _childsplay_.”

“Sorry,” Al said.  “You’re on speaker.”

“S’fine,” Ed said.  “If you could just—get the computer before… somebody else does, or something—”

“I’ll put Winry in charge of that,” Al said, “and then I’ll get Roy to bring the keys so we can move it if it’s still drivable, and meanwhile I’ll come pick you up.  Have they seen you yet?  Are you at—”

“Sacred Heart,” Ed said.  “Not yet.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Al said.  “How did _you_ get there?”

Ed swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed again.  He had to get through this.  He had to dig it up from within himself somehow.

“Kimblee,” he said.  “He’s the one who hit me.”

Al’s sharp intake of breath was his only warning before the silence set in.

Winry didn’t respect institutions, though, and silence counted as an institution at a time like this.

“Who?” she asked.

“Is he gone?” Al asked, and it sounded like he was parceling the words out—carefully articulating one sound at a time, so that he wouldn’t fucking scream.

Ed’s head ached, and his heart ached, and his shoulder was a mess of pain and old remembrances.

“Yeah,” he said.  “Fu…” He tilted a glance towards the receptionist.  She looked busy, but better not to risk it.  “He left.”

“I’ll be right there,” Al said, fucking _grimly_ —sounding like a warrior, not a kitten dad.  “Just keep breathing deep, okay?  If they take you in, I’ll stay in the waiting room.  Okay?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  And it almost was; it almost could be, if Al was on the way.  “Okay.”

“I’ll see you soon,” Al said.  “I love you.”

The breathing part of the imperative was getting harder.  “You, too, Al.”

Al hung up, and the silence on the line was just—

Too big.  Too much.  Too open.

Ed leaned back and closed his eyes.

  


* * *

  


Naturally, they called him in before Al got there—probably about thirty seconds before Al got there, knowing his luck.  It took a significant number of the paper towels by the little room’s sink for the doctor to get all of the blood off his face, although at least she didn’t seem particularly perturbed by it.  She’d probably seen a hell of a lot fucking worse.

She took her sweet goddamn time stitching him up, though, which was arguably a good sign, since it must’ve meant she was being careful and trying to reduce the likelihood of him ending up with a big white scar over his eyebrow, but the bottom line was that he was getting way too much intimate time with the point of her needle, and he wasn’t sure how long his tormented psyche could _take_ it after the day he’d had.

It was his own fault he’d turned down the local anesthetic, though.  He’d thought of it as saving himself an unnecessary needle encounter, but it was pretty undeniably making the necessary needle encounter worse.

After a brief stint in poky-metal purgatory, however, she shined the penlight in his eyes, gave him an assessing look, and told him he was free to go… pay his copay at the front desk.

Al was up out of one of the shitty chairs and haste-jogging towards him almost before he could get his eyes to focus on the waiting room.

“Brother,” Al said, and he reached out and then hesitated, searching Ed’s face, and it took a second for Ed to realize that Al was trying not to overstimulate him or something.

So Ed reached back towards him and grabbed his arm and hauled him into the hug.  Just to make sure he knew it was okay, obviously.

…obviously.

“Winry got your laptop,” Al said, both fists clenched in the back of Ed’s shirt.  “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Ed said into Al’s shoulder, which was… sort of… true.  “Gonna be, anyway.”  That was closer.  “Thanks.”

Al drew back, and Ed clung onto one of the world’s two most precious forearms with one hand and applied the other to digging his wallet out again so that he could hand his credit card to the receptionist.

Al waited until they were halfway across the parking lot—Ed still holding onto his arm; Al with one hand tangled up in the side of Ed’s shirt—before he sighed quietly.

“Roy’s at our place,” he said, and Ed stopped walking.  Al stumbled another step forward before managing to follow suit.  “He was getting us the spare key for your car,” Al said, watching him, “and I asked him to bring some of your clothes.  He’s worried about you.  He said if you don’t want to see him, he’ll go.”

_Want_ wasn’t the word—wasn’t the question.

_Want_ had nothing to do with it.

What Ed _wanted_ was to collapse into Roy’s arms and never fucking leave again.

The only thing he wanted more than that was to set the best man he’d never deserved finally free of him and his endless fucking bullshit.

And he was so fucking exhausted at the ass-end of this awful fucking day that he didn’t think he had the strength to say it.  Not to Roy.  Not right now.  And if he didn’t—if he cracked, if he gave in—it’d be over.

Couldn’t risk it.

He tried to run his non-Al-gripping hand through his hair, but there was so much blood caked into his bangs that it sort of got stuck.

“I don’t—” Fancy that, his throat was getting stuck, too.  “I dunno if I—can—yet.”

Al tugged very gently on Ed’s shirt and mustered a smile for him.  “That’s okay.”  He slipped his phone out of his pocket and started leading them towards the car again, composing a text as they went.

Ed really wanted to look at it, but that was—what, rude?  Stupid?  Selfish?  He’d hurled himself headfirst into this stupid hole; he had to deal with the consequences.  He had to trust Al to handle it in whatever way seemed right to Al.

Ed was also stymied by the extremely fucking unfortunate fact that, for the last five years running, peeking over Al’s shoulder had been virtually impossible without a step-stool.

Whatever Al was texting, it was taking a long-ass time.  Maybe he was writing Roy a fucking novella.  Or maybe he was trying to transcribe the details of Ed’s condition so that Roy wouldn’t have to worry about Ed dying in the middle of the night or some shit, because Al was a decent person who thought about other people’s feelings and tried to do what was best for everyone and generally balanced out Ed’s latest promotion to _Undisputed Emperor of Human Filth_.

The Volkswagen Beetle was probably older than was really safe, but it had been guaranteed up, down, and sideways by Al’s personal live-in mechanic, so Ed only ever felt a _little_ trepidation climbing in and settling on the worn-ass seats.

“Buckle up, buddy,” Al said softly, and that was—

— _not_ all right; not even close to fucking allowable; not even in the same neighborhood as okay.

That was something their mom had used to say to him when he was tiny, and the shoulder-belt used to be so uncomfortable that he’d try to get away with sitting in front of it until she sewed a little fleece cover for it so that it wouldn’t hurt his neck.

Ed leaned back against the headrest and breathed in slow.

“Really,” Al said.  “Put your darned seatbelt on.”

That dragged a smile out of Ed’s beleaguered facial muscles, at least.  “All right, all _right_ ,” he said, fumbling for it.  “Slave-driver.”

“We prefer the term ‘chauffeur’,” Al said.

At least there’d be someone to make stupid-ass fucking puns with him even if he never saw Roy again in his life, right?

Oh, _God_.

  


* * *

  


His Civic was parked out on the street when they got back to Winry’s and Al’s apartment.  The damage didn’t look…

Well, the damage looked shitty, but Ed didn’t know much about cars.  Had he left anything in that trunk that he’d actually intended to get to one of these days?  Shit.  Probably it was just some motor oil and a couple of grocery store paper bags and his jumper cables, but that was going to be the kicker; half of the real estate along the back bumper had just sort of… crumpled.  Was that really bad?  At least it was obviously still drivable, more or less; at least it hadn’t damaged any of the engine stuff, because that was what was expensive, right?

Ed’s head wouldn’t stop fucking pounding like a whole two-hour taiko drum show.

Winry was out the apartment door and halfway down the walk by the time Ed opened his door to get out—the hug hurricane hit him about ten seconds after that, and she knocked the breath right the fuck out of him.

“Are you okay?” she asked.  “I mean—he said you were, and you didn’t sound like you were about to take a nap in your deathbed or anything, but—”

“No permanent damage,” he said.  Theoretically that was true, although he’d read that once you stacked a couple concussions on top of each other, they started to get progressively more dangerous.  “How bad’s the car?”

“Your insurance’ll cover that easy-peasy,” she said, giving him one last squeeze—which, _ow_ —before she let him go.  “C’mon,” she said, latching onto his sleeve instead of his torso, which he supposed was an improvement, in order to start hauling him towards the front door.  “We gotta get some food in you before you pass out.  Or after, but that gets messy.”

“Gross,” he managed.  “Is—”

Was it pathetic to ask?  If Al had texted saying _Please don’t stay; maybe he’ll be up to seeing you later_ , Roy would have left.  Roy was like that—Roy was good like that.

But what if Al had said something else?

What if he’d thought he was doing the right thing, the better thing, by encouraging Roy to stay—

Except Roy would’ve been out here as fast as Winry, wouldn’t he?  And speculating about it wouldn’t change whether he was inside or not; Ed was just going to have to fucking face it either way.  No rest for the wicked, or the weary, or the train-track stitched-up foreheaded, evidently.

“Well, your dinner got pretty Arctic while we were waiting for you,” Winry said, “but that’s what microwaves are for.”

“Thank you,” Ed said, which could barely begin to convey what he really meant—all the thousand levels of _You guys took me in when I fucked up my own life for stupid-ass reasons and started making me a share of your dinners without expecting anything in return_.

“Don’t thank me ’til you’ve tried it,” Winry said, holding the door open for him.  “It’s a new recipe I found on a forum.  Al almost cried when I said that.”

“I did not,” Al said.

“Correction,” Winry said, shutting the door after all three of them; “Al _looked_ like he was going to cry when I said that.”

“Possibly true,” Al said, and Ed couldn’t remember whether it was normal for them to lock the deadbolt.  Al was doing it so calmly that it might’ve been just habit—but it might’ve been the kind of fake-cool that was reserved for trying not to draw Winry’s attention to something new.  “I was a bit taken aback.”

“You were scandalized,” Winry said, staring for the kitchen.

“Only a little,” Al said.  He reached down and scooped up the cat, which had wandered over to stare at them.

“Get over here, nerd,” Winry said.

There was a pause.

“Ed-nerd,” Winry specified.  “I need you to tell me how much you want, and don’t say ‘all of it’.”

“How about ‘most of it’?” Ed asked, trying to force his miserable, achy fucking shoulders to relax as Al, kitten cradled in against his chest, ushered Ed into the kitchen after her.

“Eugh,” Winry said, but not too emphatically, so that was all right.

  


* * *

  


Ed was trying to sleep—he really, truly, honestly was.  It was just that there were too many discrete factors interfering with the prospect: part of his mind wasn’t sure whether or not the concussion was bad enough that he should be woken up every couple hours or some shit, so it didn’t really want to sleep at all; the rest of it was just _racing_ with the last dregs of the adrenaline, cycling through useless thoughts, churning for its own sake, and he couldn’t quiet it down for the life of him.  The curve of the couch under his back was distracting.  It wasn’t like he hadn’t slept worse places, obviously, but like an idiot he’d trained himself—he’d let himself get acclimated to the nice things, the fine things, that could get taken away in a fucking instant and never returned.  He’d gotten used to Roy’s bed.  He’d gotten used to the cushy mattress and the silky sheets and the soft, low metronome of Roy’s breath and the detectable heat of him just a few inches away.

And Ed’s head hurt, and his shoulder hurt, and they’d told him he could take Tylenol, but Al hadn’t let him empty the bottle, and—

And Kimblee was here.  Not just _here_ ; there’d always been a chance of him making his physical presence in the town far too fucking known—naturally, he’d never let Ed find out where he actually lived, but he’d clearly spent enough time on the downtown drag given how well he’d known it before their shit had ever started, so even if he wasn’t directly local, he was certainly familiar.  There had always been a possibility of him just… showing up.

But this was different.  This wasn’t random; this wasn’t a coincidence.  This wasn’t fucking accidental at all.

And he’d backed Ed into a fucking corner with society on his side, and now they had to communicate about insurance and shit, and Ed owed him one for the drive to the hospital, and it was just so _easy_ for that fucking monster to pin him to the wall again.

For a second, he’d liked it—Kimblee’s hand tight around his jaw, holding his chin.  For a second, he’d thrilled to it, and his blood had beat blindingly hot.

For a second, it had felt so good to be touched like he was _wanted_ —wanted too much, too eagerly, too violently for the ordinary channels of human contact to suffice.

It wasn’t his fault.  Was it?  It was just a visceral reaction, and bodies were stupid; his didn’t know what was fucking good for it; it wasn’t his fault if he couldn’t rule it with an iron fucking fist after a whirlwind of minor trauma, right?

It wasn’t.

It didn’t make him—bad, wrong, fucked up; it didn’t mean he was _asking for it_ ; it didn’t mean—

Anything.  It didn’t mean anything.  He knew that; if somebody had posed this hypothetical to him with any other human being standing in his place, he would have answered without hesitation.  It wasn’t his fault.  It was never the fault of the victim.

There it was—there he was, yet again.  How many fucking years had he dedicated, now, to striving with every last damn breath not to be the universe’s punching bag?

He rolled onto his back, pushed his hair out of his face, stared at the shadowed expanses of the ceiling, and scrubbed the heel of his hand at his eyes.

He was going to ruin everything tomorrow if he didn’t get some fucking sleep.

He closed his eyes and tried to take deep breaths from the diaphragm, focusing as much as he could on counting out the duration of every inhale and every release to distract his brain from all of the other shit.  Why did people count sheep, anyway?  Sheep could be jerks.  Why not… clouds or something?  Or cotton candy?

One stick swathed in concentrated sugar like an unnaturally-blue spider-web.  Two sticks swathed in concentrated sugar like…

Maybe sheep were easier.

Maybe Ed was just going to have to give himself another concussion by knocking himself unconscious against the arm of the couch.

  


* * *

  


He knew with a gut-level, instinctual certainty that this was Kimblee’s place.  The kitchen was all gleaming chrome and black granite countertops, and for some reason the bed was just shoved up against the wall where a dining room table probably ought to be.  Surely Kimblee could afford more than a studio, or something; but on the other hand, he was exactly the type to forgo delineations between different rooms when it fucking suited him, right?

Right.

Ed was handcuffed to the headboard—which was a really nice, polished dark cherrywood, so it was a shame somebody had hacked a fucking hole in it to loop the handcuff chain through.

Details.  He needed the details for some reason.  To tell the cops later, maybe.  Like they’d fucking care.  _Are you sure you weren’t drunk?  Are you sure you didn’t tell him ‘yes’?  Don’t you know judo?  Why didn’t you just kick his ass?  You must have wanted it.  You must have liked it.  If you set a precedent for rough sex with him before, how can you blame him for doing it again?  You have to be careful about the things you say to people, son._

Kimblee came into the kitchen humming softly.  That wasn’t like him; he must’ve been in a _really_ good mood.  He went to the shiny-ass refrigerator and opened up the freezer side, and then he started sorting through all the foil- and plastic-wrapped objects on the shelves.

“Ah,” he said.  “Good.”

Ed tugged on the handcuffs.  His wrists tingled.  The old scar running up the side of hand towards his thumb—the mark from last time—was reddening.  His right shoulder ached, slow and deep like a fucking premonition.

Kimblee closed the fridge and brought his tinfoil-wrapped selection over to the counter nearest to the bed. He set it down, reached into a drawer, and withdrew a chef’s cleaver.

“Watch carefully,” he said.  “You might learn something.”

Ed’s heart clenched, unclenched, clenched again; and every thudding beat gathered another wisp of the panic flitting at the edges of his mind.

This was bad.

This was _so_ bad; something had gone horribly—

Kimblee unwrapped the foil—layers and layers; when three crumpled sheets gave way, Ed saw—

Fingertips.

Knuckles.

A whole fucking hand chopped off neatly, cleanly, just above the wrist.

He couldn’t—

Movebreathespeak _scream_ —

“This is important,” Kimblee said, flattening out the foil underneath.  He picked up the knife and—

Sliced off the first finger—right where it joined the hand.

No blood; it was too frozen; it should’ve been harder for him to get through the bone, but the knife was so _sharp_ , maybe—

And Ed—

Knew—

That hand.

Oh, God.

He did; he _knew_ —

“Are you paying attention?” Kimblee asked, honey-voiced, and loose dark hair rippled around his shoulders, and his hands with the gleaming knife moved so fucking swiftly—separating the next finger from the palm, and then the next—

The edge of the foil curled up, and Ed knew exactly what the fucking sharpie-written label was going to say as he read it.

_ROY MUSTANG_.

And the terror hit him like a tidal wave of ice-water; like diving into the deep end of a frozen fucking lake; no air, no space, no room, no _chance_ —

And he woke up laid flat in the dark, gasping like he’d really fucking drowned.

He was—

He was at Al’s and Winry’s; he was on their stupid couch; he was—

He was fine; everything was fine; Roy was—

Roy wasn’t here for him to _know_ ; Roy wasn’t here for him to reach out and fucking touch, and—

And he’d swiped past all of it to call Al—he’d just skimmed over all the texts; it had been a matter of fucking survival at that point; Al had superseded everything.  He’d deliberately made his eyes go blurry so he couldn’t see the words, and he’d tapped right the fuck away from Roy’s messages without reading a single word.

But he knew they were there.

And he hadn’t let himself look at them before he went to sleep.

And what if—

It was just a stupid dream.  It was just his stupid, sadistic unconscious brain dragging him through a little more mud after a day full of fucking grime.  Roy was fine.  Roy had to be fine.  Roy hadn’t gotten anywhere near Kimblee; Roy hadn’t done anything; even if Kimblee did have his goddamn address now—

_Fuck_.

Ed sat up.

He knuckled at his eyes until the vague contours of the room settled into dimly recognizable shapes.  Then he stretched over to the coffee table and picked up his phone.

His heart thumped—once, twice—and then it started to pick up speed, and he had to get this the fuck over with before it took off fast enough to leave the rest of him behind.

He swiped across the screen and thumbed over to his text log.

There was the _Please call me?_ that he’d pointedly ignored; and then, hours later, the block of text with all the other _please_ s, like fucking knife blades sticking out at every angle.  _You’re too important_ , like anybody who’d ever met him wouldn’t scoff at that—

There was another one, from just a couple hours ago, sitting in its own little bubble beneath its own little timestamp:

_Please just let me know if there’s anything I can do.  I mean that.  I’m not asking for any promises or anything in return.  I just want you to be all right._

Who the fuck did Roy Mustang think he was, going around letting people fuck up his life and then treating them like they were still worth loving when they’d never been worth _jackshit_?

From Ed’s hazy recollections of how the night had gone, that last one must have been sent at about the time that Roy got home again—after swinging by here, that was, and dropping off not just an article or two of Ed’s clothing, but a whole fucking suitcase, meticulously packed with everything he never would’ve thought to ask for.  He’d cracked it open just far enough to identify half of his wardrobe, all of his computer crap, a _book_ he had left on the living room table with a mark in it—and his toiletries, all in individual little Ziploc bags; and one of the softest towels; and a folder full of documentation about his job; and some of his mail, and—

And when a recently-minted ex treated you like shit and dumped you out of the fucking blue, you were supposed to fling their stuff out the second-story window onto the lawn and wait for the sprinklers to come on.

That was what a part of Ed fucking _wanted_ —to get the remnants of the crap beat out of him, at long fucking last.  To lose hope.  To have no fucking reason to try loving anybody anymore, because it always ended in misery and fucking tears.

But instead—

Instead, here he was, with his phone clutched in both hands, feeling like he’d jumped off of a cliff and impaled himself on the rocks below, heart-first.  That was what they meant by _falling_ , wasn’t it?  Wasn’t it always?

He had to do this before he lost his fucking nerve, or he’d never be able to get back to sleep.

He typed out the words, _Are you okay?_

Then he stared at it.

Then he stared at the little numbers of the clock at the top of his screen.

It was three fifteen in the fucking morning.  Maybe if this woke Roy up, he’d be so pissed that he’d cut off contact with Ed’s dumb ass once and for all.

Ed closed his eyes for a long second, until he could’ve sworn he could hear the shadows starting to move.

Then he opened his eyes, and then he sent the message.

Shit.  It looked even stupider on the screen.  Christ; like he hadn’t gone far the fuck out of his way to _be_ the reason Roy was probably—possibly, maybe—feeling like crap right now; like that wasn’t the whole goddamn point.

_sorry_ , he added.   _i had a shitty dream and i just sorta wanted to check in and make sure you’re still in one piece._

Nothing fucking stupid about that.

Could you force somebody to give the fuck up on you by sending them progressively dumber text messages?

Worth a try.

He sent it.

He leaned back against the couch and looked in the direction of the front window, belied in the dark by a little sliver of streetlamp light between the curtains.  Of course Al had fucking curtains in his homey little apartment.  He’d probably made them himself.  It was a miracle he’d kept the cat off of them so far.

The phone vibrated in Ed’s hand, and in the split-second it took him to turn his gaze back towards the screen, his heartbeat fucking _surged_ all over again—because what if it was Kimblee?  Or what if Roy really was fucking finished with all of Ed’s shit, and this was the last text he’d ever see typed by those beautiful fucking fingertips?  Or what if it was Kimblee _on Roy’s phone, having fucking murdered him already_ , and—?

That fucking panic-thought only worsened when he realized how similar a cool-angry Roy and a self-satisfied Kimblee might actually sound.

He shoved his hand through his hair—which was much more successful this time, because Al had demanded that Ed take a shower, the duration of which the best nagging mother hen ever reincarnated as a twenty-something guy had spent listening at the door to make sure Ed didn’t pass out and fall and hurt himself.

Then he forced himself to focus on the words.

_I suppose ‘okay’ might be a stretch, but I’m here._

It wasn’t even that there was a lump in Ed’s throat so much as that his entire being was a conglomeration of aching knots of different sizes, and the full length of his esophagus had coalesced into the single tightest one.

Another message appeared underneath the first before Ed could figure out what the fuck was worth saying.

_Are YOU okay?  Alphonse said it was just stitches, but that can’t have been fun._

God fucking damn him for being so—

Himself.

Roy just—cared too much.  That was his problem; he cared too much—indiscriminately.  He poured time and effort and attention into shit he never should’ve; he devoted himself to lost causes with a single-minded sort of ferocity.  It was like an addiction.  And any real friend would stage a fucking intervention and cut him off before he hurt himself too badly for it to heal.

Ed took a few deep breaths.  His head was fucking swimming with the exhaustion; this was the worst possible time to be trying to navigate a minefield of emotional what-if-maybes—to be playing the kind of self-control game he’d never won in his life—but he hadn’t given himself much of a choice.

_not the best night i’ve ever had but it’s cool,_ he typed out.   _Sorry i woke you up._

_It’s really all right,_ Roy responded, practically instantaneous; and then, seconds later: _Did you call it in to your insurance company?  I’m sure they’ll cover the cost of urgent care -- one less thing to worry about._

He shouldn’t have been doing this.  He shouldn’t even have been _thinking_ about communicating with Roy; communication was a form of connectivity, and if he didn’t set the expectation of total severance, there’d be little strings and threads and bits of business drawn and bowing in between them, and Roy would never really get away.

Fuck him for ever letting it get this far.

Fuck him for letting it get one text further.

_Yeah Al helped.  it sounded like they were going to take care of it even if they can’t track him down._

He was playing a secondary game at the same time—which was even more fun, and which was called “Is It the Concussion, Or Am I Really in Danger of Vomiting Up My Own Heart?”

_thank you for bringing my stuff_ , he typed out next. _that was really nice of you._

He breathed in, and out, and then sent it.

Again with the too-fucking-nice—Roy didn’t make him wait.

_Not at all.  Glad to help even a little._

Ed wanted so, so fucking badly to just—

Quit.

Just give it up; just give in; just let the straining, yearning, bleeding impulse in him make him type out _Who’s little???_ and break the ice and the tension and let Roy right back in.

It would be so fucking easy.  It would feel so fucking good.  He could go _home_ ; he could crawl back into that beautiful bed and curl back up with that beautiful man and forget about this whole fucking nightmare for a while.

And Roy would let him.

Roy would let him drag them both back down into the mire that Ed carried everywhere inside him.

He couldn’t be good enough for Roy Mustang, but he had to be better than that.

_Helps a lot.  i really appreciate it.  sorry again for waking you up.  i’ll let you get some sleep.  hope the trial and everything is going okay._

Silence.

Good.

Cold and sharp-edged and fucking awful, like he deserved.

_I wouldn’t have put the phone next to the pillow if I hadn’t been hoping to hear from you,_ Roy sent.

That was worse than the silence, actually.

_Hope you sleep better this time,_ came the next one.  _Don’t worry on my account, all right?_

If this was the kind of pain that could be parceled up in tears and then released, Ed might have tried it, just to see.

But it wasn’t.  It was so much fucking bigger.  It was so much fucking worse.

And he’d done it to himself—to both of them.

_thanks,_ he sent.  _goodnight_.

Was there anything he wouldn’t have fucking given for a stupid little pictogram heart right about then?

He turned off the screen and set his phone back down on the tabletop.

Roy’s reply lit it up again, just for a second.

_Goodnight, Ed._

Fuck everything.

  


* * *

  


When his brain shook itself out of an imaginary obstacle course comprised almost exclusively of tar pits just before six, he gave up on trying to glean any more sleep and dragged himself off of the couch.  He was pretty sure he’d showered just last night—Al had made him; he remembered; he _had_ —but his skin felt so thick, and his eyes were so gummy, that he thought he might need another.  He didn’t want to wake anybody else up with the pipes, though, so he hauled his miserable mortal vessel over into the kitchen and put the coffee on instead.

Heralded only by a brief bit of shuffling down the hall, Winry was up by five minutes after, padding in with her hair so disheveled that, as far as criteria for the Bedhead Hall of Fame, it probably rivaled his.

“I’d ask how you are,” she said, crossing the little kitchen to get a mug, “but I think it’d be an insult to my own intelligence.”

It was way too fucking early—in the day in general, and also in the sacred process of funneling caffeine into his bloodstream—for complicated conversation.

“Okay,” Ed said, since that seemed relatively safe.  He gestured with his elbow—hands were for carrying coffee receptacles—towards the machine.  “Sorry.  Couldn’t wait.”

“Gosh,” Winry said, filling her mug from the carafe.  “I _hate_ it when somebody waltzes in and has the java all ready by the time I get here, so all I have to do is pour.”  She cradled her cup close to her face and breathed in the steam for a second, which redeemed her a little bit for keeping grounds instead of beans.  “Al only ever touches tea these days, so usually I’m on my own.”

Al was the kind of person who could spontaneously make more time appear to allow himself to juggle sleep, studying, socializing, and occasionally averting Ed’s stupid-ass fucking crises, so it sort of figured that he’d given up on coffee once and for all.  Half the point of it was the power to propel yourself through obligations at inadvisable speeds.

“Traitor,” Ed said anyway.

“Yeah,” Winry said.  She rummaged in the fridge and started adding dairy products to her mug, because you really couldn’t fucking trust anyone these days.  “So… let me phrase that question less-stupidly—are you feeling better than you expected, or worse?”

If two roads had diverged in a yellow wood just now—one of which led to the day Ed was about to have; the other of which wound directly into certain death—it was a bit of a toss-up which one he’d take.

“I’m fine,” he said.

Winry rolled her eyes.  “That wasn’t the question.”

In the spirit of lifelong friendship and shit, Ed made a serious effort at gauging himself.  He felt about a thousand years old; that weird sleepless-sweat film had settled over every square centimeter of his skin; his eyes stung, his head ached, his stitches itched like a motherfucker, and there was a hollow, hungry void in the core of him consuming every last little glimmer of light.  He still needed to rummage through a suitcase packed for him by the love of his life, whom he had wounded and abandoned for a greater good that neither of them could appreciate just yet, so that he could go stand at a chalkboard and try to distract a hundred undergrads from Facebook before hurling himself off of the money-grubbing grant cliff for a few more hours.  Paola was still MIA dealing with a tragedy she hadn’t imposed on herself, but her notes didn’t tell him where she’d left off in the next stage of their follow-up experiment.  And his phone was burning a hole in his pocket—kindled halfway to a bonfire by the aching, untapped possibility of comfort in every single one of Roy’s fucking texts; splattered with gasoline by the purely practical consideration that unblocking Kimblee’s number might make it significantly easier to sort out the insurance crap.

But he was here.

He was alive.

Al was here; and Winry was here; and there was coffee, and the cat was butting its head against his ankle like it wanted him to share.

“Could be worse,” he said.

Winry sighed.  “That wasn’t the question either, dumbhead.”

“You know what I mean,” he said.

She smiled, and tried to hide it with an exasperated shake of her head, and turned back to the coffee machine, but it was too late.

“Wouldn’t kill you to _say_ what you mean, though,” she said.  “Instead of assuming I’ll get it.”

He sipped, and the coffee was good, so that was all right.

“Shows what you know,” he said.

  


* * *

  


“Holy shit!” the girl with the glasses who always sat in the front row blurted out when Ed stepped into the lecture hall.  “Are you okay?”

He stopped with his back foot still raised a few inches above the threshold—abruptly enough that a student behind him made a surprised noise.

“Um,” the girl said; “I mean—are you okay… Professor Elric?”

That was never going to stop breaking his brain a little bit.

“Yeah,” he managed, crossing over to the podium-desk-thing and slinging his laptop bag down.  “Just a little fender-bender.”  He’d made it this far by focusing intently on the tiny individual actions that made up larger tasks—pull out his laptop; lay it on the podium; flip up the lid; tap the Enter key.  “My car took a beating, but it’s such a piece of crap anyway that the untrained eye probably couldn’t tell.”

She smiled, looking genuinely relieved, and that was—

That was something.  It was something that people—near-strangers; people who didn’t owe him anything except their vague interest in return for a grade—actually kind of gave a shit about him as a human being.

That was something, because it was a reminder that the world wasn’t all just shit.

  


* * *

  


On the world-was-shit end of the spectrum, he was _positive_ he’d just seen a twist of Kimblee’s ponytail disappearing around a corner as he trudged up the hill to his lab.

He’d imagined it.  Right?  Surely he’d fucking… but all the information was pretty much public—it sort of had to be; students needed to be able to find his office hours, and administrators needed to know where to track him down and harass him about his finances; he had to have an internet profile that gave up his location and some of the basic contact shit.  Probably he could’ve fought it, but as far as pragmatism went, he’d never really had a choice.

That left two explanations.

First, he was finally fucking cracking up: the paranoia had overpowered him at last, and the visual hallucinations were setting in.

Second, Soph Kimblee gave so few fucks that he’d actually taken time off from his job to follow Ed everywhere, just to make it painstakingly clear that he _could_.

Ed knew which one it was when he unlocked the door to the lab space and almost stepped on an unmarked white envelope that someone—“ _someone_ ”—had slipped under the door.

His heart swelled up in his throat and started shuddering.  Damn, he’d missed that fucking edge-of-a-panic-attack feeling over the course of the, say, twenty hours since the last time he’d peered over the side of this particular cliff.

He had to slow down.  He had to fucking think.  This was—this was just another part of the game.  Another scare tactic.  Another lousy ploy.  And he wasn’t going to get fucking played anymore.

He breathed in and out real fucking slow, and then he fished his phone out of his pocket.  He thumbed over to the camera, and then to the video setting, and then turned it on to record.

The Al and Roy voices in his head were in vociferous fucking agreement on this one, and he knew exactly what he had to do.

“Um,” he said, holding the phone up between both hands to try to reduce the shaking.  “This is—weird.  Embarrassing.  Sorry.  Um.  It’s—” He glanced up at the clock on the wall, which for some reason got maintained better than the rest of the place.  “It’s a little after two o’clock on Thursday, September tenth.  I just walked in, and… yeah.”  He crouched down, trying to keep the camera steady as he focused on the envelope.  “This was here.  The door was locked and sh… stuff.  So.”

Deep breaths.  He’d always thought the idea of one of those little plastic phone stands was fucking stupid, because it wasn’t like he was going to binge-watch five seasons of a show on his phone and sit there staring at the tiny screen for hours, but all of a sudden the concept sort of made sense.

He switched the phone to his left hand and picked up the envelope in the right, turning it back and forth to show that there wasn’t any writing anywhere on it.

“I think I saw him outside,” he said.  “Hard to be sure, but… yeah.  If that matters.”  He set the envelope back down and pinned the corner with his toe.  “Sorry my shoes are gross; it’s been… a hell of a week.”  Then he wedged his index fingertip under the flap of the envelope and pried it loose.  “So let’s see what…”

The envelope fought him, and then he managed to rip through the last of the fastening, and it slipped out of his fingers and dumped its contents onto the floor.

They were photographs—nicely-printed ones on glossy paper, like they’d been done professionally at Kinko’s or something.

They were pictures of his car.

“What the fuck,” Ed heard himself breathe out.  A little wisp in his brain said _You can bleep it out later_ ; the rest of him was too gobsmacked by the tidal of wave of fucking _bullshit_ to think much of anything.  “Those are—that’s—he must’ve—I mean, he must’ve fucking—driven around the whole fucking neighborhood until he found it, and—he knows where _Al_ lives now; he fucking—he—”

The next breath spread barbs inside his throat, digging little hooks in deep—

“Okay,” he said, more to himself than to the stupid fucking video.  “Okay, I—okay.  I mean—he—hang on.”

His last shaky exhalation had shifted one of the photos enough to reveal a note.

“‘Thought these might be convenient’,” he read, just in case the camera was shivering too much for anybody to read the words—and also because they were— “Fucking _unbelievable_ —”

He had to stay fucking calm—he had to slow his breathing and keep his fucking cool; the whole world looked like it had slipped underwater; everything had gone all blurry and shimmery and shit—

_Count to five as you breathe in, and hold it for four, and count to six on the way back out,_ was what Al kept saying.   _A prime and then a square and then a perfect number—easy, right?_

Easy Ed’s fucking ass.

He planted the fucking ass in question on the floor so that at least he wouldn’t have to divert any of his motor skills towards balance, since they were suffering enough as it was.

“Right,” he said, forcing the sounds out through the quaver in his voice.  “So—if you’re playing along at home—in twenty-four hours, that’s… followed me from my workplace and hit my car, drove around the neighborhood where my brother lives until he _saw_ the car, photographed it without anybody’s permission, and came _back_ to my workplace to leave unsolicited shit.  Stuff.  Instead of giving me his goddamn insurance or anything.”  Five, four, six; five, four— “He just fucking wants me to know that there’s nowhere to run.  That’s what this is.  He just _wants_ me to know that he’s holding all the fucking cards, and he can get to me anywhere, and—”

At least he was already sitting, so he didn’t have to sink to the floor while his knees gave out, because that would’ve been seriously stupid.  And inevitable.  But no less stupid for the inevitable part.

“And this is what I moved house and dropped off of the grid and killed all my social media accounts to get away from,” he said, and the words prickled all the way up.  “It’s been—it took _years_ to train myself back out of looking over my fucking shoulder all the time; it took _years_ to feel something like fucking safe again, and… here we go.  Here we are.  He’s too smart to make an outright fucking threat, but he wants me to _know_ , so that he doesn’t have to.”

He hadn’t paid attention to what the camera was pointing at in at least a minute, but he figured that probably wasn’t the point anymore anyway.

Five.  Four.  Six.

“All right,” he said.  “I gotta get some work done.  Probably nobody could get DNA samples out of spit on an envelope.  And if you can, I bet he knows that.”

He shut the camera off.

He realized—about a billion fucking years too late—that he hadn’t shut the door behind him, so anybody who’d left their lab door open anywhere along the hall had just been treated to his whole rendition of that borderline-psychotic little soliloquy.

He picked himself up off of the floor, shoved his phone back into his pocket, and bested the impulse to hesitate before leaning down to gather up the photographs.

Al probably had a designated box somewhere for all of this shit.  He’d want to keep these.

  


* * *

  


The anxiety was an underground river.  It was a subterranean current running, distantly detectable, just beneath every other emotion; under every dip and rebound; behind every train of thought.  It had a _presence_ —physical, indelible.  It moved, tangibly, in the pit of his stomach—half insect-wing flutter; half sick food-poisoning lurch.  He’d think it was fading, and then it would _pull_ again, a tug of fear and frantic desperation, with just a touch like longing.

But it hadn’t killed him yet.

  


* * *

  


Ed’s phone buzzed a little after five.  He was in the process of packing up his shit, because his brain was fucking oatmeal after the repeated failures to get multiple hours of sleep like a functional person, and there wasn’t much point trying to work—but slowly, because leaving campus at this time of day was ludicrous anyway.

He had, however, finally submitted the fucking grant, with multiple hours to spare, so at least that was one lead fucking weight lifted off of his shoulders.

It couldn’t be Kimblee—on the phone, that was; there was no doubt that Kimblee was one of the heaviest of the fucking anvils Ed was dragging around—

Except it could.  Because Ed hadn’t unblocked his number, but the good money had it that Kimblee had rented a car specifically to crash into his, apparently just for _fun_ , so what the hell was stopping him from getting a brand new fucking phone and sending Ed all kinds of brand new fucking venom?

Well, shit; he wouldn’t know until he fucking looked, whether his heart strayed out of his ribcage in the meantime or not.

He shoved his notes into his laptop bag, followed them with the cord, and dug up the phone before he could cop the fuck out and try to ignore it.

It wasn’t Kimblee.

It wasn’t Al.

It wasn’t Win.

It was Roy.

_I know you have a hell of a lot going on, but if you get a chance, please let me know how you are?_

That hadn’t really needed to be phrased a question—and it wasn’t like Roy to make it one if it made less sense that way.

He was trying to be… gentle and non-confrontational and shit.

Ed wasn’t exactly in a hurry to wander over towards the medical school to wait for the stupid bus to take him, in a gloriously roundabout way, to the depot where he could catch a city bus that would let him off about a mile away from Al’s and Win’s place.  The buses didn’t leave that often anyway, so his options were basically killing the time here, or killing the time on the shitty-ass bus stop bench.

But he couldn’t let this just—go on.  He couldn’t let Roy keep offering kindness; he couldn’t keep _taking_ it—for whatever reason, Roy wasn’t willing to drop him like a hot fucking rock on a summer day, and the longer he accepted it, the more Roy was going to think that this thing still had a chance.

That wasn’t fair.  That wasn’t right; taking comfort because he was fucking weak enough to need it from anywhere he could get it—and leading Roy right the fuck on in the process—was another screeching chalk-line tally on the long, long board with the heading _Shit Ed Fucked Up_.

But being an asshole about it wasn’t exactly a viable alternative.  Roy was just trying to help.  He was just trying to be nice.  He just cared.  And maybe punishing him for compassion would deter him from holding it out to Ed, but maybe it’d wound that streak of love in him, and that—

Ed couldn’t.  He couldn’t do that to someone who’d been good to him.

Which narrowed his options a bit.

_i’m okay,_ he sent back, typing slowly, like it’d spur his brain to unforeseen heights of brilliance if he tapped the letters out one at a time.   _you?_

He put the rest of his crap into his bag and then—leaned on it.  Waiting.  Roy never took too long.

_I suppose ‘getting by’ would sum it up,_ the bastard wrote, sure as the north fucking star.   _I’d really like to talk to you, but I know you have lot to deal with, between yesterday and the grant and all of the rest of it -- do you have any time this weekend?_

What the fuck was he supposed to say to that?  “Nah, sorry, planning to spend it alternately slaving away in lab and wallowing in self-fucking-pity”?

He’d lost track of the things that sucked right now, but maybe that was the worst part—losing the closeness.  Sacrificing the utter and complete fucking safety of Roy’s misplaced affection—the incredible coincidence of their senses of humor; the easiness of every interaction; the fact that he could say whatever stupid or sarcastic shit came to mind, and Roy would be there, getting it, and meet him halfway with a dumbass snarky riposte—felt like tearing out a long strip of cardiac muscle one centimeter at a time.  Combination-pain; the sting-sear-ache; different nerves getting hit with different types of hurting all at once.  Blood everywhere.

It would’ve been a dick move on an unprecedented scale to string Roy along when Ed had no intention of letting him tie them back together.

But it wasn’t any better to treat him like shit.

_not quite sure yet,_ he sent.  That was a marginal improvement over either the truth or an outright lie.

_That’s fine,_ Roy’s next message said, which was hilarious, or something.   _Just let me know?  An hour for coffee, maybe.  Someplace near you, if there’s one that doesn’t singe their beans past recognition._

Ed loved him.

_That_ was the worst part.

Ed loved Roy like the unimaginable span of the universe and the slow burn of the stars and the way Al smiled with every single muscle in his face.  Ed loved Roy like there wasn’t, and never had been, any other choice in the absurd trajectory of his stupid little life—like he had always, always been headed here.

_there’s always time for coffee_ , he typed, because he just couldn’t fucking help it; Roy held warmth out to him in cupped hands, and he was a goddamn fucking moth for it every time.   _i guess probably whatever works for you_

Ed owed him that much—owed it to him to sit down with him and look him in the eyes and say _This has to stop; you have to let me let go of you_ when his voice was clear and his heart wasn’t ricocheting around inside his skin.  It needed to be a civil conversation; it needed to be concrete.  Roy deserved a hell of a lot more from him than just some signed, sealed, and delivered fucking closure.

Ed could do it.  Ed could do whatever he had to.  His whole life was a fucking PowerPoint presentation about that.

_Okay,_ Roy sent, which was also funny as fucking hell.   _I’ll check in with you Saturday, if that’s all right?_

Questions.  All these statements delicately reconfigured, like Ed was so fucking fragile or so angry or so defensive that he’d balk at a command.

Maybe he would.

Maybe he was enough of a shitheel to take that as a reason, to point at _Come meet me Saturday at 10_ as an example of controlling behavior or too many expectations, to make it an excuse to cast off everything Roy was trying to give.

Maybe if Roy pushed at all, he’d push back hard enough to knock them both over.

Or maybe he’d cave the instant Roy gave him a clear instruction, because he wanted to be directed—wanted to be wanted, to be guided, to be owned.

_sure that’s fine_ , he sent.   _i’ll be around_

And that was that.

Wasn’t it?

Maybe he’d get lucky, and the bus would show up right when he got there.

  


* * *

  


He was not lucky.

Not that that was a surprise, or anything, but it still kind of sucked.

  


* * *

  


“Boop,” Winry said when Al got the door, “what’ve I been telling you about dragging stuff in?”

“Rude,” Ed said.

“Sorry,” Winry said.

“Lie,” Ed said.

“Whoa,” Winry said.  “Ease off on the cutting comebacks, would ya?”

The terrible thing was that he was actually too tired to lift his hand and give her the finger.

“Brother,” Al said, gathering up the kitten and shoving it at Ed’s chest, “come sit down and have some dinner.”

He couldn’t really come out and say _Can I just—not?  Food is pretty boring right now.  Everything is pretty boring right now.  All of it feels fucking perfunctory.  I guess the numbness is setting in._

He had to do better than that by Al—by both of them, honestly; Winry, queen of her domain, hadn’t said a single shitty thing about him using all the hot water or about how his feet smelled or about how he was making the couch all lumpy by sleeping on it funny or anything like that.

So he sat down at the table, with the purry little cat bundled up in his heavy arms, and ate what they gave him, and tried really hard to listen to the cheery conversation that they had.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HERE WE GO, GUYS!
> 
> Please forgive me for the romanticized, hopelessly nostalgic travelogue shit I've got going on here. :'D  And I hope those of you in the UK in particular will forgive me for the things I've forgotten, the things that have changed, and the things that I was too lazy to research in enough detail to make up for the first two. XD
> 
>  
> 
> **RECAP:** Present-day!Ed is arriving in Edinburgh, Scotland as he starts to wind down his trip, having just sent Gracia an email asking if she has any advice on how to handle the situation with Roy. Past-tense!Ed is struggling to deal with the aftermath of Kimblee's sudden reappearance and also how desperately he just wants to run back to Roy.
> 
>  

He has a seminar thing scheduled for tomorrow morning down at the university, but once he hauls his ass to the local Travelodge—no sense whatsoever in spending the department’s money or any of the spare change in his grant accounts on things like fancy hotels; what the hell is wrong with people, anyway?—he’s left with several solid hours for aimless tourism.

Which is a fucking godsend, because Edinburgh is _beautiful_.

It’s coiled charcoal clouds and stark blue sky and faded, smoke-smudged dark yellow stone; it’s shadowed corners and uneven cobblestones like giant’s teeth paving the ridiculously steep hill up towards the castle.  It’s barrels full of tartan scarves out in front of every store and fucking _Scottish accents galore_.  And a guy on a unicycle juggling bowling pins, apparently, although Ed’s not sure if that dude’s a regular local feature or not.

Ed is warming up to the British tendency—or is it a habit?—to cram miniature museums into all of the old forts and castles and then charge an admission fee.  He’s pretty sure the States would do the same thing if they had any castles to speak of, and anyway the museums are fucking great: swords and armor displayed and diagrammed everywhere; history whispering from the walls, breathing mistily against the polished glass of every case.  And there’s this obsession with not letting people get too close to any part of what seems to be an extremely expansive crown jewel collection, like photographing them would somehow reduce their inestimable value, and the whole place would be Mediocre Britain in the time it takes to blink.

He takes his time exploring and snapping pictures of battlements and chained-down cannons (he can hear his own voice telling Roy “They wouldn’t let me take one home; can you believe that?”, and he winces in real time, and probably the Australian tourists nearby give him a side-eye, but he doesn’t dare to look).  When he’s pretty sure he’s exhausted every last little corridor they might be hiding armor and swords in, he wanders down— _way_ down, on an incline like a ski slope, only with cobblestones that want to kill him, or at least forcibly dismantle the structure of his ankles—to go check out one of the cafés that Rowling supposedly used to write in.  They’ve got a little sign on the window, which is pretty tactful compared to the small explosion of merchandising at King’s Cross.  He goes in and buys a cup of tea and sits down to watch people go by on the slightly-murderous street.

It’s funny, the little things that are different—literally, that is, in the case of stuff like cars; all the vehicles are smaller here.  And because they drive on a different side of the road, people walk on a different side of the sidewalk, and it sort of spins the cardinal directions a little in his head.  The plants are different—all of them; he couldn’t begin to fathom exactly what the distinctions are, but even just a glance at the leaves makes his brain instinctively classify the greenery as foreign to him.  Partly from that, partly from the way their chimneys and exhaust pipes are built, probably, the taste of the air isn’t the same.  People smoke more here, too, and there’s a pub on every single freaking corner—but then there are so many brightly-colored flowers tucked into windowboxes that he’s long since lost count.

It’s just different.

And it’s fascinating.

And he simultaneously misses home and never wants to stop soaking all of it up—he never wants to have to leave.

One of his guidebooks cheerfully informed him that he’s a failure of a human being if he doesn’t take the short hike up some hill that overlooks the city, so once he’s observed enough passersby for a lifetime or two, he hoofs it that way.  There’s an ancient-looking, totally _beyond-kickass_ cemetery partway up; he has to dart over and step in and take a couple dozen “Al, I’m not a _Goth_ ; I just like cool stuff” photos of that.

Turns out the guidebook wasn’t shitting him, though—when he tops the hill, Edinburgh’s sprawled out on all sides, framed by a killer fucking sunset, a thousand windows gleaming in the last of the light.  There’s this random-ass set of Grecian-looking pillars up here, like it was meant to be some kind of acropolis; as the sun goes down, it silhouettes them, and everything is that same dark-yellow stone nestled into patches of forest green.

It’s fucking gorgeous.  The world is fucking gorgeous—sometimes, anyway.  Sometimes when it counts.

When he makes it back down—miraculously without killing himself in the growing dark, which would be rather a shame after all of the effort he’s put into getting here—he walks into one of the first places he sets eyes on that looks like it sells food.

Soon after, he discovers that ‘South American’ restaurants in this country are lacking something nebulous but critical.  It’s something to do with authenticity—or with physical proximity to the cuisines in question, or maybe the former as a result of the latter’s sabotage.  Whatever the case, there’s nothing _bad_ about the food, but it’s bizarrely unrecognizable despite its noble intentions, and the whole thing ends up tasting… boring.

Which is fine, because he gets desperate enough to check his email on his phone.

Gracia sent him something back.

_Dear Ed,_

_I would be more than happy to do anything I can.  I think this is a conversation that might do better on the phone than over email, though, so if you have time, maybe you could call whenever you’re available?  My lunch hour would coincide with 8 o’clock your time, or any time after 10:30 over there should be fine._

_One thing I want to say now, because I know you will be thinking it:_

_This is not your fault._

_Roy has always been extraordinarily good at hiding.  It is not a reflection on you that he didn’t tell you everything.  He loves you with an enormity that honestly surprised me, when I saw it — he’s always held back before.  You bring him closer to fearlessness than anyone I think he has ever known.  It is not your fault that he hasn’t come with you all the way.  That’s a part of him that has always been there.  He protects himself.  And he doesn’t lie, at least that I know of, but he hides.  Oh, does he hide._

_Call me if you get a chance!  I will keep my phone handy either way, just in case._

_I will tell Elicia you won’t be getting her anything at all unless she organizes the mountain of polaroids on her bedroom floor before you get back. :)_

_All my love,_

_Gracia_

Oh, good.  Now he’s fighting more stupid fucking tears in a restaurant in Scotland that’s never seen a serrano pepper in person before.

What a fucking week.

  


* * *

  


Ed was playing something of a dangerous game as far as loitering around Al’s and Win’s place Friday morning.  On the one hand, his class didn’t start until noon, and moping around his silent lab trying to sweet-talk the centrifuge sounded like a shitty way to spend a morning.  On the other, if he hung out here, he risked interrogation by the world’s undisputed master of tact.

“So when are you and Roy hooking up for fabulous makeup sex?” Winry asked _as_ she sat down with her coffee cup, before he’d even taken a breath to brace himself.

At least he hadn’t been dumb enough to sip, since his mouthful would’ve been all across the table at this point.

“Don’t fucking assume,” he managed when he’d stopped almost choking on his own spit.  “You know what happens when you assume shit.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Winry said.  “You make stupid, overused wordplay remarks, and then I keep doing it anyway.”  She leaned forward, apparently ignoring her coffee cup, which was enough of a crime in and of itself.  Her hair was going to end up in it in another minute, though, which would serve her right.  “So regardless of the consequences of me assuming stuff, what’s the news?”

Pointedly, he felt, Ed took a sip from his mug.  Winry did not get the hint.

“He asked if we could meet up tomorrow,” Ed said when the silence got annoying.  “To talk, I guess.”

Winry’s eyes were so luminescent at this point that she could’ve leveraged it for a killer Gollum impression.

“He ‘asked’,” she said.  “What did you tell him?”

Ed pushed at the handle of his mug with a fingertip until it started to rotate.  “I told him maybe.  Kind of implying yes.”

He half-expected her to start clutching her coffee and calling it _Precious_ , which—while pretty fucking horrifying, honestly—would be preferable to this conversation.  “Does Al know?”

“No,” Ed said.  “’Cause he’s actually staying out of my fucking business, unlike some people.”

“I’m not _in_ your business,” Winry said.  “I’m just around it, trying to figure out what the heck it is.”  She sat back, raising her mug in a mock toast, and finally fucking drank from it.  “So I can place bets on makeup sex.”

“If you’re trying to scare me out of your house,” Ed said, “it’s working.”

She rolled her eyes.  “As if, Ed.  Al’s practically over the freakin’ moon about getting to take care of you for once, after everything you’ve done for him over the years.”

That…

…did not compute.

“Like what?” Ed asked.  “Practically got him killed and then barely kept us out of the poorhouse by forcing him to live on pastry-case rejects for years on end?”

Winry gave him the _You Are So Full of Shit You Ought to Be in Politics_ look (patent pending) and swilled her coffee a little bit.  “And, you know, busted your ass every single day since you were a kid trying to give him the happiest and best and most normal life you could.”

“Trying to give it _back_ , you mean,” Ed said.  “I’m the one who took it away.”

“No, you’re not,” Winry said.  “Your dad did.  And then cancer did.  And then bad things happened to you, and they weren’t your fault.”

It had always struck him as funny—well, struck him, at least, a little too hard, with an edge like a weapon—that people were constantly talking about how you got back what you put in, and good things came to good people, and there was some kind of concept of karmic justice… right up until they ended up with a result that they didn’t think that they deserved.  It couldn’t be _both_ —the universe couldn’t be balanced and indifferent at the same time.

And if it was benevolent, somebody like Al simply wouldn’t have had the childhood that he did.

As far as Ed was concerned, there wasn’t really a question.

Winry must’ve seen some partial reflection of it on his face.

“Whatever,” she said.  “Point is, we’re glad to have you for as long as you want to stay.”  She lifted her mug, moved to sip from it, and paused.  “Other point is that you should definitely go meet up with Roy.”

He drank deeply from his coffee in an attempt to suppress the urge to sigh.  “Your vote’s been counted.”

“If this is a democracy,” Winry said, “I’m positive Al votes for it, too.  And the cat does.  And Granny would, if you asked her.”

“It’s not a democracy,” Ed said.  “And the cat can’t vote.”

“Racist,” Al said from the doorway, scrubbing with his towel at his hair.  “Er… species-ist.  What are we talking about?”

“Nothing,” Ed said, at the same time that Winry said “Your brother’s love life.”

Ed glared at her.  She beamed.

Al looked at Ed, and then at Winry, and then back at Ed, and then over at the counter where the kettle was perched next to the coffee machine.

“Can we talk about my caffeine life instead?” he asked.

Ed loved him more than there were words for—more than language could encapsulate even if you layered every iteration of affection that there was.

So if this was rock bottom, maybe one of these days he’d be all right.

  


* * *

  


He abandoned ship at the lab a little later than the night before, but the voyage had been more or less successful—all of the ornery equipment was cooperating for once, and he’d gotten some good shit going.  It was a solid foundation for the next phase of experiments, on top of which it would make a great excuse for cutting out of the meeting with Roy tomorrow if the prospective encounter headed south.

That was great, wasn’t it?  He was acting like a conniving piece of shit about this entire situation, which was fine supporting evidence for the incontrovertible fact that Roy needed to dump Ed’s toxic ass and wash his hands of the whole damn thing.

A phone call around lunchtime had been sufficient to convince Winry that she and Al should go out and have a nice dinner on Ed’s dollar that night as a thank-you for putting him up.  He knew that Al would read it as Ed’s way of saying _I need some alone time_ and give in on those grounds—he wasn’t sure how much of that aspect of it Winry would intuit, but it didn’t really matter.

The hilarious thing was that he didn’t want to be a-fucking-lone.  He really just wanted to pay for some of their food, and to give them a break from _him_.

The end result was that he got back a little after seven to an empty apartment, a very cutely Post-It-note-labeled tupperware of leftovers for him, and a second note requesting that he fill the empty bowl on the kitchen floor—around which orbited an extremely expectant cat.

“Okay, okay,” he said in response to the _mrow_ noises, but he gave in to the kitten eyes and leaned down to dole out some ear scritches before he rummaged around for the food.

Al had helpfully left him instructions on how long to nuke dinner, which Ed paid attention to; and also instructions to put it in a ceramic bowl instead of the plastic, because _BPA exposure is real, Brother!!!_ , which Ed ignored.  He took his really-not-the-literal-Devil heated tupperware over to the couch, since Winry couldn’t complain about the death of civilization the instant he left the table if she wasn’t here, and opened his laptop up on the coffee table.  He couldn’t quite remember the last time he’d watched a TV show without Roy, but… surely there was… something.  Or at least something interesting enough to binge on, beginning now.

He’d set his phone on the table so that he could slouch more efficiently next to the pile of his half-folded bedding.  He had obviously not left a spot for the cat to join him if it deigned to, and he had obviously not just burned his tongue by digging into the food too fast even though Al had warned him to let it cool for _At LEAST 45 seconds, okay?_

Despite the fact that he was the last human being on Earth without a Netflix account, there had to be something that he could dredge up from the depths of the internet to entertain himself with.  Anything would work, for fuck’s sake; all he really needed was a distraction—just enough white noise to drown out the clamoring of his stupid fucking brain.

He ended up with YouTube videos of science shit.  Which was sort of like work, but also comforting enough that he could relax a little and glaze over slightly and attend to the process of eating, which he could’ve sworn he’d used to enjoy or something.

His phone buzzed, and his spine tightened, and he glanced over at the screen.

Two minutes after eight, and a text from Roy Mustang.

_At risk of sounding tragically histrionic, missing you is agony._

That was—fishy.

Not _unnerving_ -fishy, just… off.

Because Roy knew better.  And Roy had only sounded manic and desperate and uncontrolled that first day; yesterday he’d been back to the regular carefully-composed, grammatically-perfect little sentences, with their semicolons and subjunctive clauses and whatever other shit.

This was—

Different.

And Ed wished he didn’t have a fucking theory about why.

_are you drunk_ , he wrote.

Probably that was unspeakably rude, but it wasn’t like he had anything to lose.

Roy’s response was, characteristically, almost fucking instantaneous.

_I’m working on it._

_christ_ , Ed typed.  Then he deleted it.  Then he typed _listen_ instead, and followed it with _we’re going to talk tomorrow and you can say whatever you need to and you didn’t DO anything okay?  you didn’t.  so could you please not fucking punish yourself?_

_I can hardly wrap my intellect around the notion,_ Roy replied, because of fucking course he did, even when he was ‘working on’ drinking; _that the sudden implosion of the best relationship I have ever had had nothing to do with me._

And it ached, ached, ached.  It wrung Ed’s heart out like a wet fucking rag, over and over and over again.

_it didn’t,_ he sent.  _i’m telling you it DIDN’T because it’s not about you Roy it’s about me, and that’s the problem, it’s always about fucking me at the cost of you and you fucking deserve fucking better and i’m not going to stand in the way of your fucking opportunity to find that and will you please just take it and run?_

He swallowed, which was getting progressively harder.  Maybe Al had finally found something he was allergic to, and it was in whatever he’d just scarfed down without really noticing the taste.

_No,_ Roy said.  Fucking typical.  _Because you’re wrong.  You’re wrong about it every which way, about deserving and all of it; I don’t understand how you can’t know how much I get back from you.  Just from being near you.  That’s all I want._

Everybody always talked about how empathetic dogs were, but cats got it, too.  Boop didn’t even like Ed, but he hopped up onto the couch and curled up against the side of Ed’s ribs and stayed there while Ed wrote the next message:

_you can’t fix me, Roy.  nobody can and i’m not going to sit here and watch you waste your life trying._

Boop nudged a wet nose at the inside of Ed’s elbow, which was cold and horrible and stupidly cute.  Ed stroked the little fuzzy head, fighting the perpetually-tightening coil of fucking terror in the center of his chest, until the phone buzzed again.

_There’s nothing to fix,_ Roy had sent.  Bastard got predictable when he was drunk.  Drinking.  Whatever.  His capitalization was still spot-the-fuck-on, though, so he must not have gotten too far yet.  _The only part of you that I dream of changing is the one that insists that you’re unworthy of love._

Ed ground his teeth against each other, then the heel of his hand against his eye.  Then he put both thumbs to the screen again.

_i can’t get my shit together and i’ll never get my shit together and you don’t need that_

Simple.  Factual.  Concise.  Right?

Did Roy know what fucking torment it was to imagine him texting?  Anything that had to do with his perfect, gorgeous, talented fucking hands; anything that sparked memories of the slide of his fingertips on Ed’s skin—

Shot through now with blood and lightning by that shitty fucking dream of Kimblee chopping them to little pieces and smiling at the stark gleam of the knife.

_Edward -- none of us, not a person on the PLANET, has their shit together.  Every one of us is scrabbling under the surface and gasping for air.  You don’t have to get it together.  Just let me help you pick it up whenever it falls and carry it wherever you’re going, God, please, just LET me.  That’s all I’m asking for._

He didn’t get it.

For someone so fucking smart, Roy could be pretty damn obtuse when he worked at it.

_you were fine before me and you’ll be fine again.  i fucking hate seeing you hurting but it’s the ripping off the bandaid part and you’ll be okay, you will, you’ll get over it, you’re fucking strong and shit.  so would you please just stop fucking picking at the scab already.  you’ll be fine_

Ed wasn’t quite sure who he was trying to convince at this point.

He reached across the cat to put the phone down on the tabletop, where it rested for almost a fucking minute before Roy texted back, and he had to stretch over and snatch it up again.  The unnecessary movement prompted Boop to make a low noise of protest like an engine turning over, and Ed rubbed at one of his ears to make up for it.  And also maybe a tiny bit to procrastinate on reading the block of text that had just showed up on the screen, but he couldn’t fucking hide forever.

_Ed.  Yes.  I could survive without you.  I could survive without a lot of things; I could survive without colors or light or salt in my food or blankets on the bed, or without chocolate or coffee or sex.  That would be a life, yes.  But it would be gray and cold and bland and miserable; it would look like ash and taste like ash and I have breathed enough of that for my lifetime, and I don’t want that.  I don’t.  I want you.  Because you make it bright and vibrant and sweet and warm and worthwhile and I know you don’t believe me but I swear to you, I swear to ANYONE, that you make me happier than I ever could have fucking dreamed back then, and if you have to go you leave me grateful for having known you, but please please PLEASE don’t go, Ed.  Please don’t leave.  I don’t know how to prove it to you but I’ll find a way, I’ll show you, I’ll USE SCIENCE, I don’t know, just please let me try, Ed.  Please._

Boop climbed up his chest—which hurt, actually, because kitten claws—and rubbed the side of his fuzzy little face against Ed’s jaw.  It was obnoxiously cute.  It probably had something to do with the fact that Ed was fucking crying again, which was decidedly not cute, though possibly almost as obnoxious.

He mopped at the stupid bullshit fucking tears with his sleeve and tried to take a deep breath and focus on the basic problem here—he had to get Roy to give up.  Somehow, some way, he had to persuade a bastard who persuaded other people for a living to relinquish a long-since-lost fucking cause.

_you’re going to get over me,_ he sent.  _you’re going to be better off.  that’s what i want._

Relationships were supposed to be mutual and shit, right?

Roy didn’t even give him fifteen seconds.

_I love you._

Fuck.  Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ ; he could feel the fucking sobs clawing their way up his throat, shaking his whole fucking skeleton like thunder at the windowpanes.

_stop_ , he sent.  It was about all he could think of, and the screen kept going out of focus as the tears stung and swam around his fucking eyes anyway.

_If I never see you again,_ Roy sent, _I will go on loving you.  So I’m afraid that if you think you’re doing this for my own good, it’s not that easy._

Boop had started pushing his head at Ed’s neck at this point, like maybe the addition of a warm cat scarf would stop the hitching, choking noises slipping past the hand he was holding over his mouth.

_you’re drunk and im going to talk to you tomorrow if youre not too hungover so just go to bed or something okay_

He hugged the cat while he waited.  This was embarrassing.  Good thing Boop couldn’t sell him out to Al as a secret cat appreciator.

_I love you,_ Roy replied, because he was a fucking _bastard_ , that was why— _You can’t stop me; you can’t talk me out of it; you can’t take it away.  That’s mine to give.  And it’s yours.  It’s yours if you want it, and if you do I don’t know why we have to have this conversation.  Please just come home.  Please.  I know you think you’re doing the right thing, but who the hell is it the right thing for?  Because it’s not for me.  You’re the right thing for me.  Please come home.  I miss you.  Waking up without you there is so much worse than I ever would have imagined.  It feels like I made up the whole thing.  I keep looking at the pictures on my phone to remind myself that it didn’t, that I had you, that you were there and warm and breathing and so beautiful i can’t fucking stand to look at you sometimes please come home Ed please_

Ed was actually crying _on_ the cat at this point, which Boop understandably took issue with; when tears hit the fur, he squiggled out of Ed’s arms and bolted.

_go to sleep,_ Ed sent.

_I love you_ , Roy sent back.

_shut the fuck up and go to sleep_ , Ed typed in—it took a couple tries, with his hands shaking and the whole world going fucking liquid rainbow and shit.  _i’m turning off my phone until tomorrow morning so drink some fucking water and go to sleep_

Maybe that would be enough.

Maybe Roy would get tired of trying.

It wasn’t even nine o’clock, but he shut off all of the sounds on his stupid fucking phone except for the alarm and turned out the light and dragged the blankets over himself and shut his eyes.

If he feigned sleep well enough, Al and Win would just walk by without trying to talk to him, and maybe they’d spend one more night believing he had a handle on _anything_ in his stupid fucking life.

And maybe if he gave it a good enough shot, he could stop existing and fucking disappear.

  


* * *

  


Figured he couldn’t even merge with the fabric of the universe and cease to persist as an individual physical entity right: when morning duly dawned, he was still around.

He fumbled to grab his phone and kill the alarm noise; no sense waking Al and Winry up if they were hoping to do the unthinkable and _sleep in_ on a Saturday.  Not that it was especially close to any particularly ungodly hours, or anything, but—still.  Being a Decent Houseguest 101 had a whole class period dedicated to not disrupting your charitable hosts too early in the morning.

After briefly weighing his options, Ed decided on a repeat of his recent strategy of running the coffee machine before the shower, since the former was significantly harder to hear from the bedroom.

While it percolated, he steeled himself and tapped into the settings on his phone.  He turned all the sounds back on, and then he checked his messages.

There was one he hadn’t seen yet from Roy.  All it said was _Goodnight_.

He looked over at the coffee machine, watching the slow drip as it sputtered its way towards a pot of liquid near-salvation.

Too fucking bad _near_ wasn’t enough.

  


* * *

  


Al and Winry had gotten up, promised him that dinner had been very nice, tactfully not commented on his probably extremely red and fucking swollen eyes, and thanked him for making the coffee—all before nine, which landed him in lab by ten.  He still hadn’t heard from Roy.

Which was fine, actually.  Which was perfectly fine and fucking dandy to boot, because Paola had emailed him some of her notes, and they were onto something really good—something really good and really _cool_ , and there were little flickers of real excitement filtering through all of the ambient dreck in Ed’s brain.

It was nice—occupying himself with something else was nice; his brain was full of logic and questions and ideas and science, and all of the facets of exploration conspired to raise a hubbub just loud enough to drown out the rest of it.

It was still fucking lonely in this empty-ass lab.

None of the cafés stayed open on weekends; a few of the students’ dining halls deigned to part their doors, but for his money, he was pretty much stuck with the fucking convenience store.  To be fair, they sold some decent stuff, like those little cheese rounds in the wax, and fruit that wasn’t actively molding, and energy drinks, and Hot Pockets, and twelve kinds of Cheetos.  Were there twelve kinds of Cheetos?  Winry would kill him if he had Cheetos for lunch.  Well, Winry would kill him if the Cheetos didn’t first.

He settled on a plastic-wrapped sandwich that didn’t look like it had been marinated in preservatives for all that long before getting shoved into the refrigerator with some dozen of its haphazardly-packaged brethren.  He got a Coke to go with it, because life was short, and when he was outside of the warm haze of the science zone, he still kind of felt like crap.

Which apparently showed, since the cashier blinked at him and said “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said.  His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he almost jumped out of his fucking skin; the sandwich popped out of his unsteady hand and bounced across the counter by the register.

Very fucking convincing.

“Um,” he said.  “Thanks.  For asking.”

The guy tossed the food into a plastic bag and then handed him his credit card receipt, which was a waste of paper as well as time, but such was life.  “Sure.  Have a nice day.”

Ed managed to say “Thank you” instead of “God, believe me, I am fucking _trying_ ,” so that was something, at least.

He pulled out the phone as soon as he’d stepped over the threshold.  It was Roy.

_Would 3 o’clock work for you?  Any venue that you like._

Ed didn’t really like anything or anyplace on the planet right now, but since that was three hours away, and Roy was handing him the power to pick the battlefield, he couldn’t really back out.

He tried to assess all of the requisite criteria—it had to be within walking or bus-accessible distance for him, but with parking for Roy, which was nonetheless far enough from campus that Ed wouldn’t be likely to run into any students he knew.  The coffee had to be drinkable; the place had to be quiet enough for the two of them to find a spot to sit but loud enough that nobody would really hear their conversation; and it had to be a shop where he wasn’t acquainted with any of the fucking baristas, which was harder than you’d expect when you’d hung out with Rosé a couple of times, because she knew _everyone_.

He drew a breath and typed out the best possible compromise accounting for all of the relevant factors.  Before he’d even exhaled, he’d started mourning the fucking necessity of planning and calculating a text to Roy—this used to be his fucking sanctuary.  This used to be a relief.

_how’s Ground Rules on oxford ave, would that work?_

Roy didn’t leave him hanging for long:

_Yes, of course.  I’ll see you then._

He would, too—because it had occurred to Ed that the best way to hedge his bets on every single item on his requirements list was to show up early and bring some data to analyze or a lesson plan to pick away at.  Then, if it failed one of his tests when he arrived, he could bail with plenty of time to direct Roy to a new rendezvous.

They didn’t pay him to do this science shit for nothing.

  


* * *

  


If his brain was a well-oiled analytical machine, his heart was a twisted, rusting, heat-swelled jalopy hanging too-high and too-heavy behind his sternum, constantly threatening his throat.  Nothing primed you for a tense encounter with your dangerously attractive ex quite like an hour-long call with your insurance agency while you were trying to have something that resembled lunch.

All the same, by way of his lousy skinbag, he dragged both objects over to Ground Rules, which entailed a twenty-minute bus ride and a half-mile walk, although at least he didn’t have to transfer lines for once.  Hopefully this would guarantee that none of his undergrads would walk up and start asking about their midterms while he was sitting there stewing in existential angst.

He hadn’t been to this place in a while—all he really remembered was that their coffee was pretty good, and they had a huge front window that gave you a nice view of the park across the street.  All in all, a decent place to show up a full forty-five minutes before Roy was due to meet him and sit there pretending to work diligently while his fucking head teetered back and forth.

Fortunately, after he sat down with a cup full to brimming with the pretty-good stuff, the pretending tricked his brain into thinking about the latest data set, and pretty soon he ended up working diligently after all, with the teetering thing ongoing as a sort of back-burner side-job deal.

“Well,” a vaguely familiar voice said after an indeterminate interval.  “Good to know some things never change.”

It took him a long second to register that, despite the fact that the numbers were still in front of him, the words arriving at his eardrums from the ether seemed to be directed at him.

He blinked hard, resisted the urge to shake himself like a wet dog, and looked up.

It was—

“Russell,” he said, somewhat stupidly.  “What?” he added, which was possibly even worse.

Russell swiped a wet rag across the half of Ed’s little round table that wasn’t blanketed in printouts.  “Your timing is still the worst,” Russell said.  “Is what I meant.”

Ed stared at him.  “…thanks?”

Russell smirked.  “Guess that’s a step up from ‘Shut the fuck up, Tringham.’”

“Gotta change the catchphrases out before they get stale,” Ed said.  “What are you doing here?”

Russell made a show of working at a stubborn spot on the tabletop that did not actually seem to exist.  “Oh.  I figured you’d heard.  I turned up high at Has Beans a couple months ago, and Marta fired my ass on the spot.”

Ed felt his jaw dropping and was powerless to stop it.

“Yeah,” Russell said, and this smirk might have qualified as rueful if he had ever demonstrated anything like human feelings in the past.  “I was pretty pissed off at first, but really she was well within her rights.”  He stepped back, opening both hands and tilting them down to indicate himself, despite the fact that one of them was still trailing the rag.  “Went clean after that.  Figured it couldn’t hurt to try.”

“I’ve figured a lot of things couldn’t hurt,” Ed said, “that ended up hurting a lot.  How’d it go?”

“As you see me,” Russell said, which was dumb, because obviously nothing visual had changed; but of course he wasn’t done yet.  “Un-blazed for four months running, gainfully employed.  My brother no longer has nightmares about me selling him for a few grams of the good shit.”  Ed couldn’t tell if that was an exaggeration or not and wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.  “It’s been—kind of a mixed bag, though, in a lot of ways,” Russell was saying.  “I mean, all my friends were people I’d met doing it, or that were really only my friends at all ’cause we did it together.  So I kind of had to start from scratch.”

Ed’s chest clenched sympathetically.  “Yeah.  I know that feeling.”

Russell shrugged a little.  “Yeah.  Anyway—that thing I said about the timing was ’cause I just got off my damn break, so I can’t hang around.  I could comp you something if you want, though.”

Ed looked down at the store mug he did not remember half-emptying, and then up at the clock on the wall, which said it was already fucking five minutes to three.

“Nah,” he said.  “Save it and bring your brother home a latte or something.”  He was pretty sure hazelnut had always been Fletcher’s favorite.  “I gotta order another mug, though; you wanna ring me up?”

“Depends,” Russell said, starting over towards the counter.  “You gonna tip?”

Ed did, actually; and he threw a bottled water in on top of his order when it occurred to him that Roy was probably going to be, if not outright hungover, at least a little bit dehydrated from last night.

And it hurt.  Fucking everything hurt.  But the little stuff, like fixing Roy’s coffee exactly how he fucking liked it, somehow hurt the worst.

He set the mug and the water and a pack of Advil from his bag down on the empty side of the table and sat down to wait.

Roy was never late—but since he wasn’t a wizard, that tended to mean that he was usually a little bit early.  Ed was expecting him pretty much any second now.

He’d always sort of rolled his eyes at the adage about how watched pots never boiled, because it was bullshit, obviously; thermodynamics proceeded whether it was being observed or not.  So he watched out the window, and he waited.

And the water heated, and heated, and gently began to steam.

Ed recognized Roy’s shape well before any part of him came into focus.  It was funny how you could subconsciously catalogue the way that someone _moved_ and identify them by it as a matter of pure, instantaneous instinct.

Roy was walking slower than he usually did, though.  And he was wearing his favorite pair of slightly-trashed, more-than-slightly-faded jeans, and he’d put a navy blue button-down shirt on over a white T-shirt—but he’d left it open and rolled the sleeves up almost to his elbows, because he wanted Ed _dead_ , apparently.

Maybe that was part of his game plan.  Roy Mustang knew how fucking sexy he was; knew how irresistible he could be; knew how he could make susceptible people bend to his will like so many willow branches.  Roy Mustang had power even when he came to beg.

God.  That was what this was, wasn’t it?  Roy was coming here to beg Ed to stay, and Ed was going to sit in this fucking chair and beg Roy to leave.

He looked down at his notes as Roy got close.

The shadow passed across the window.  The door opened, with a jarringly cheery little jingle of the bell.  There was a pause, and then there were footsteps, and then the empty chair across from Ed was drawn out, scraping softly on the floor.

And then there was another pause.  And then Roy said, “You have the biggest heart of anyone I have ever met.”

Despite his dogged fucking efforts to keep his eyes fixed intently on his notes, Ed couldn’t help glancing up at that.

Roy had laid two fingertips atop the cap of the water bottle, and he was looking at Ed and smiling like his fucking heart had broken all over again.

“It baffles me,” the bastard said, “that you’re so determined to keep people out of it.”

Ed swallowed.  Looking at him was so much fucking harder; being within touching distance was fucking _torture_.

“I dunno,” he said.  “Having other people inside your heart sounds like a serious medical emergency.”

The corners of Roy’s mouth twitched.

His fingers curled around the back of the chair until his the bones in his knuckles started to bleach.

He tugged the chair out a little further and then sat down.

“What about transplants?” he asked.

“That’s tissue,” Ed said.  “I thought we were talking about foreign bodies.”

Roy opened his mouth.

He shut it.

“I shouldn’t say what I was just thinking,” he said.

Ed gave him a look.  “Saying you’re not going to say it is as good as saying it, and you know it.”

To his credit, Roy really tried to smile.  “Caught red-handed,” he said.

Ed’s brain went fucking blank-void-white—wide open and completely empty; echoingly clear.  He couldn’t think of a single fucking thing to say.

He looked down at the tabletop, past which he could just see his hands where he’d clenched them around each other in his lap.

“Ed,” Roy said—softly, so softly, fucking _kitten-fur_ softly; so gentle it felt like he’d stroked his fingertips across Ed’s soul.

Ed pushed his tongue against the back of his teeth, then made a valiant effort at clearing his throat.  Looking up was too much—too risky.

“Yeah?” he said.

“I’ve been rereading the things you wrote,” Roy said.  Of course he had; lawyers were born analyzers of language, weren’t they?  Every single punctuation mark meant something to people like Roy.  “And I’ve been trying very hard to listen to what you’re saying instead of just reacting, because I think the point is that it should be about both of our feelings—in equal measure, balanced, right?  About what we both want.”

His voice was shaking a little, but you could tell he’d prepared this.  He’d probably practiced in the car.

Ed’s coffee sure did look… like sludge, actually.  He’d left it for, like, half an hour now.  Which was a fucking pity, because he really needed some warm, sweet fucking caffeine right now.  They should’ve manufactured epi-pens or some shit.

“But there is,” Roy said, “one fundamental part of what you’re saying that I just can’t understand.  Maybe that’s on me.”

It was never on him.

That was the fucking _point_.

Movement drew Ed’s eye, and he glanced up just enough to watch Roy’s hand creeping across the tabletop towards him and then flattening itself out over the center of the table, fingers spread.

“Ed,” Roy said, “be absolutely honest with me—please.  I know you always are, except when you’re trying not to hurt someone, and I need you not to think about what’s best right now—just what’s true.”

Every part of this fucking man was poetry.

Ed had hated poetry all his life, right up until that first damn time he’d let himself look into those fathomless dark eyes—like he was doing now.

“Shoot,” he said.

Roy had been a soldier.  He knew how to aim.

He put on half a smile, but it was the cruel half.

“Were you happy with me?” he asked.

Ed’s mouth went dry, but the desert didn’t end there—it was searing wind all the way down; sand on his tongue, in his throat, in his guts, and boulders in his feet and hands; brutal fucking heat bursting under every last damn centimeter of his skin.

“How could you not know the answer to that?” he managed to rasp out with the last feeble remnants of moisture in his desiccated fucking cells.

This smile was even worse.  “Then why are we having this conversation?”

Typical fucking Roy, responding to his question with another question, rather than getting to the goddamn fucking point—which, for the record, was that—

“It’s not that simple,” Ed said.

Roy leaned forward.

“Why not?” he asked.

Ed leaned back, and it seemed impossible that he could lift his arms enough to cross them over the hollow of his chest; they weighed so _much_.

“Because I refuse to keep wasting your fucking life,” he said, barreling through the tremble in his stupid fucking voice, “whether or not I was _happy_ while I did it.”

Roy pressed his lips together, and it was all Ed could fucking do not to reach out and grab his collar and fucking kiss him and let this go—just let it keep dragging on and dragging Roy down into the quagmire of his stupid little life—

“I’m going to be honest, too,” Roy said.  “All right?”

He waited until Ed nodded, like it fucking mattered—like it would’ve stopped him if Ed had said _Could you just shut up and leave_.

Except that this was Roy.

So maybe it would.

“I have never,” Roy said, “in my life felt _less_ like I was wasting the time I spent with someone than when I spent it with you.  I have never felt more at peace in another person’s company.  I have never felt as whole.  I have never felt as lucky.  I have never been as happy—not once.  Not ever.”

His eyes flicked down; he splayed his fingers and then arched them to grasp the rim of the coffee cup; he turned it in one full, neat circle, and then he looked up again.

“I have never loved someone half as much as I love you,” he said.  “I have never been so damn delighted to be alive—I have never been so grateful for every single morning, because another day with you in it is worth anything else the world can throw at me.  And I have never felt so utterly that I belong—to you, with you, for as long as you’ll have me.”

Ed’s heart was still beating in his ears—presumably it’d vacated his chest for good, since he couldn’t feel a damn thing other than the slow, slow, noose-tight squeeze of his ribcage closing in around his lungs.

“I am fucking _poison_ , Roy,” he said.  “No matter how pretty you dress it up—”

“I’m only telling you the truth,” Roy said, curling his fingers around the handle of his mug.  “You’ve never been anything but good for me.  That is absolutely honest.”

Ed gripped his own fucking sleeves, trying to fold his arms tighter—trying to stabilize himself; trying to fence himself in.  Couldn’t give it the fuck up now; not like this; not after everything…

“I drain people,” he said.  “That’s what I do.  I take all they’ve got and throw it away, and I care about you too fucking much to let you end up stuck with me by force of fucking habit like everybody else I’ve ever l-loved.”

He glared out the window so he wouldn’t have to look at stupid Roy’s stupid face.  A really nice old muscle car went by, followed by a Tesla driver who looked like even more of a tool than most of the demographic.

“It’s not a habit,” Roy said.  “I’m not stuck.  And I have never given you anything I didn’t want you to have.  That’s what it comes down to, Ed.  I _want_ you.  I want this; I want us.  I don’t care about the little things that go wrong sometimes—that’s what life is; that’s not your _fault_.  I want you.  We’re good together; we’re so good together; we’ve both been genuinely happy giving it our best damn shot.  And that’s orders of magnitude more important to me than the laundry, or the dishes, or the details, Ed.  Fuck the details.  Fuck the laundry.  What I want is you, and the rest of it’s irrelevant.”

“It’s not,” Ed said.  “Because it’s all symptomatic of the larger fucking disease colloquially known as Edward fucking Elric.”

“I’ve been vaccinated,” Roy said.  “Ed—”

“You don’t get it,” Ed said.

“No,” Roy said, slanting a weak smile again, “I don’t.  But—” He was reaching across the table again; Ed curled his fingers so tight in his sleeves that they hurt.  “Think about it this way: relationships have problems.  People have problems.  But _you_ are not the problem.  And human beings are better problem-solvers together than alone, aren’t we?”

“Sometimes,” Ed said.  He somehow managed to sound cagey and stupid at the same time, which was an impressive high point in an already spectacular career of social failure.  “Sometimes that just muddles the issue.”

Roy drew a breath and let it out cautiously.  He left his hand resting on the table.  Ed kept thinking of that fucking dream; fucking knives, and the glistening meat and the tendons and the skin just sliced right through—

That was what happened to people who cared about him.

“What does Al think?” Roy asked.

“Good tactic,” Ed said.  “But I asked him to stay out of it, and so far he’s kept his mouth shut.”

Roy nodded slightly, which was hopefully a sign that he’d just abandoned some intricate plan to try to get Al to work on Ed from the inside.

“All right,” he said, which they both knew it definitively was fucking not.  “How about this: if you can look me in the eye and tell me truthfully that you’re ending this because you don’t _want_ to be with me anymore—not because of any projection of what’s best for me, or what you think I want, or what you think I _should_ want—then I will make myself respect that.  But if that’s not what it is…”

The smile broadened just a little, tilted to the side—Roy’s voice quavered, and then it… cracked.  And his fucking eyes were gleaming right along the bottom edge, and this couldn’t be happening; this had to be some kind of side-trip into Bizarro World, because Roy Mustang didn’t— _cry_ —

“Please,” he said, “for heaven’s sake, don’t jettison the best thing that’s ever happened to me over what you think I need.”

Ed didn’t figure he could have spoken even if there were words for this shit; his throat was too tight—too full of fucking feelings; jammed up all the way to the back of his tongue with emotions like so many fucking insects, and every one of them had horns or teeth or spiky legs—

He pried his fingers free from his sleeves and propped his elbows on the table and dropped his head into his hands, pushing his hair back, trying to coax a fraction of a breath down through the tangled exoskeletons.

“You’re so much more than good enough,” Roy said, keeping his voice low—hushed, husky, like it was dangerous to make it any louder than the crappy ambiance music coming from the speaker overhead.  “You are the only person in your life who doesn’t see that.”

“Shut up,” Ed forced out.

“No,” Roy said.  “Because at some level, maybe at several, that’s what this is about—this is about you thinking you’re somehow so flawed or broken or inadequate that you don’t deserve affection from the people that you value most.”

Ed swallowed.  Four times.

“You tryin’ to say you’re someone I should value?” he asked.

“I’m trying to say,” Roy said, “that I think you’ve put me on a pedestal, which makes you think that you can’t reach me.”

If Ed hadn’t gotten mild whiplash in the fucking crash, he was sure as hell getting it now, looking up this fast.

“Not to imply anything about your ability to reach things based on certain hereditary endowments,” Roy said.

“Fuck you,” Ed said—better than bursting into fucking tears again, which was his other option.

“Please,” Roy said.

Ed bit down as hard as he could bear on the inside of his bottom lip and tried to smile.

It was no fucking use anymore.  There was no fucking point.  He wanted this; he wanted the stupid fucking banter; wanted the easiness of just _being_ with Roy—just being his dumbass, nerdy-awkward self and seeing the appreciation of it in Roy’s gorgeous fucking eyes.

He wanted to be safe again.  He wanted to be safe with Roy.  He wanted his one good thing back.

And maybe that was weak, and he knew it was selfish, but he was just so fucking _tired_ of being out there alone.

The world was too big, and too much, and too cold not to stick with people who had your back, even if it sometimes felt like taking advantage.  Even if it sometimes felt unfair.

Roy wanted to keep him.  He’d _tried_ ; for fuck’s sake, let the record show he’d tried with all he had, but—

He wanted it back.

Roy extended his arm—slowly, slowly, movements smooth but not sudden—and brushed Ed’s bangs back from his forehead, fingertips grazing the gauze taped down over the lousy stitches.

Ed’s traitorous fucking skin tingled gloriously, like that was what it had been waiting for all along.

“Al said it was small,” Roy said.  “It doesn’t look small.”

“To absolve you for the dumbass shit you said a second ago,” Ed said, and his voice hardly shook at all, “I’m gonna assume you’re talking generally about my towering stature.”

“Of course,” Roy said instantly.  He swept the hair back again.  “It doesn’t hurt?”

“Nah,” Ed said.  “I only even covered it up so it won’t scare the undergrads.”

“They’re easily spooked,” Roy said.  “Like horses.”

Ed was going to say something totally fucking brilliant—just as soon as Roy’s hand moved from where it had settled lightly against his cheek.

The sensation was bizarre.  Somehow it felt simultaneously like that transcendent fucking touch had never left; and like it was the first time it had ever graced his skin.

“Yeah,” he said after so long it was probably awkward or something.  “And then they stampede.”

Roy nodded solemnly.

Then he dragged just one fingertip back along Ed’s jaw, almost to his neck, before lowering the hand.

The fucking _bastard_.

Ed’s brain just—pounded, but with a rhythmic wash like a heavy wave against the shore, hissing and receding and then roaring back and crashing hard—

Had they just—?

Were they—?

Roy wanted him back so bad that the world’s single most eligible fucking bachelor had just sat there without even sipping his more-than-adequate coffee and—pleaded.  Roy had _begged_.

And he was still begging.

He was looking Ed right in the fucking eyes, and he must have been thinking the same thing—the same convoluted trajectory of _Was that it?  Did we fix it, or not?_

“Come home with me?” Roy asked softly.

Ed choked down the worst of the tiny scythes that had stacked up to the back of his mouth.

“Yeah,” he said.

And Roy looked so nakedly fucking happy—so fucking glad, so fucking _relieved_ —in that first second that maybe it had to be the right thing after all.  Maybe it couldn’t be anything but good.

“You should drink that coffee before it gets cold,” Ed said.  “I already paid for it.”

“How old is that?” Roy asked, gesturing towards Ed’s mug.  “I could get you another one.”

Ed was just starting to sense the sharp edge of too-much-too-fast-too-real on all of his own movements—a deeper dark gathering in the shadows of his thoughts.  “I should probably cut myself off for today.”

“That’s quitter talk,” Roy said, but he was smiling—smiling like the world was just and kind and benevolent, and it had bestowed upon him the single most precious gift of his life.  That strangled Ed’s throat up all over again; what the fuck right did he have to make an expression like _that_ while he was at a table with Ed?

One of the most incomparably fucking beautiful hands in the distinctly non-benevolent world settled itself on Ed’s forearm, and Roy’s eyes went serious and shit.

“You’re okay?” he asked.

Did he know?  He knew about the situation, obviously, but had Al told him that it was Kimblee who’d bashed Ed’s Civic halfway to shit?

Better not to ask.  Better not to volunteer that.  With any luck—not that Ed had ever personally experienced the phenomenon known as _any luck_ , but maybe things were on the up-and-up—it really was just a coincidence, and Kimblee had gotten bored of tormenting him a long damn time ago, and the worst of it was over.

It could happen, right?

“Yeah,” he said.  “You?  How’s the trial going?”

Roy’s eyes took on a whole new dimension of exhaustion—which was pretty impressive, given that he already looked like he’d been dozing on a slab of marble nightly for about a week.

“It’s… going,” he said.  “Bradley is like a matryoshka doll of moral quandaries.  Every time I look, there’s another layer.”  At Ed’s wince, he mustered a smile.  “It’s all right—it can only go on so long, and it’s damn good money, for what that’s worth.”

“It’s worth room and board,” Ed said.  “Or a _lot_ of coffee.”

“Very true,” Roy said.  He squeezed Ed’s arm gently.  “How’s your car?”

“I think it’s drivable,” Ed said, “but I’ve been leaving it at Al’s place just in case.  Winry said she’s gonna check it out today and let me know whether she thinks it’ll make it to the shop my stupid insurance company picked out.  The damage is only to the back, so she’s figuring it should be pretty easily covered by my policy—except if the impact crumpled the frame far enough to affect the doors or something.”

Roy frowned.  “Exactly what happened?  Al didn’t give me much to go on—he said it was a fender-bender.”

Good.  Maybe-good.  Something.  That news was definitely something.

“Guy rear-ended me,” Ed said.  “At a fucking stop sign.”

It was Roy’s turn to grimace.  “Charming.”

“Eh,” Ed said.

Roy’s voice softened.  “Did you get the grant in?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Not even at the eleventh hour—like, ninth or tenth, maybe.”

“That,” Roy said, “is a _triumph_.”

Ed wrinkled his nose.

Roy cracked a grin.

Fuck this fucking table for being just too wide across for Ed to lean over and kiss him all over his stupid fucking face.

Roy seemed to reciprocate the sentiment; his fingers tightened just a little around Ed’s arm.  “If you’ve had enough coffee for today,” he said, “could I make you some tea?”

Ed’s heart clenched—in a good way, for the first time in several fucking days.  “Hard to turn that down,” he said.  “Is the Queen coming?”

“I’ll give her a call,” Roy said.  He indicated the notes strewn across the table with a little shift of his chin.  “Did you need to go back to the lab later?  I can give you a ride.”

“Nah,” Ed said, reluctantly shaking Roy’s hand off of his arm to start shuffling the papers together.  “Let’s blow this joint.”

“That’s not the only thing I’ve missed blowing,” Roy said, with a small but searing glint of a grin.

Bastard.  Blood rose to Ed’s cheeks.  He tried to duck to the task of note collection before anyone would see it, but Roy always fucking knew.

“Well,” Ed said.  “Good to know.  For later.  Y’know.”

“I feel it would be a bit uncouth to start now,” Roy said.  “But if you really want—”

“ _Mustang_ ,” Ed said.  “This place is pretty good—which you’d know if you’d had any of that damn coffee I got you.  I wanna be allowed to come back here.”  He tapped the stack of papers on the tabletop to align them and then slid them into his bag, giving Roy what felt like a relatively solid fake glare.  “Keep it in your pants for, like, ten minutes.”

“I’ll set a timer,” Roy said, pushing his chair back.

“Jesus,” Ed said, sending up a prayer to the anatomy gods that his knees were steady enough for him to stand on.

“I can’t believe you forgot my name already,” Roy said.

The gods had answered—or at least relented—so Ed made it upright without incident and hooked the strap of his bag over his left shoulder.  “‘Jesus’ and ‘Roy’ are pretty close.”

Roy blinked at him.

“I’m not a linguist,” Ed said.

“I’d noticed,” Roy said.

Today’s valiant contender for the title of Smartass of the Year picked up the water bottle, then the Advil, and then pocketed the latter to free a hand for the coffee mug, which he finally fucking drank from.

“Wow,” he said, looking down into it.  “This really is good.”

Ed made sure to sigh expansively.  “I _told_ you.”

“You did,” Roy said, and then he completely stymied Ed’s intention to respond, because he let his eyes fall mostly shut while he inhaled the fragrance deeply and then sipped again.  “But I was a bit distracted.”

“I don’t know much,” Ed said, “b—”

“Factually incorrect,” Roy said.

“Shut up,” Ed said.

“Mathematically false, I should say,” Roy said.

“But I _do_ know coffee,” Ed said loudly.

Roy gazed at him like he’d just said something pithy and poetic instead of something extremely dumb.

How the hell had he lasted all of two fucking days without this?

“Hey,” a voice said from behind him, and he couldn’t fucking help it if he clenched his hand around the strap of his bag and whirled around a little too fast and shifted his balance onto his back foot in case he had to defend himself.

It was, of course, fucking Russell.

Fucking Russell was holding out an offering from the pastry case.

Ed stared at it.  “What’s this?” he managed.

Russell blinked down ( _damn it_ ) at him, and then said slowly, “It’s a cupcake.”

Russell seemed to have turned over a new leaf—or, possibly, stopped turning over so many leaves in order to light them and inhale the smoke—so Ed ground his teeth on _You fucking_ think _, Watson?_ , because that was something he would’ve said to the Russell from before.

“Yeah,” he said instead.  “I got that part.  I meant—why are you giving me a cupcake?”

Russell glanced none-too-subtly at Roy, and then none-too-subtly at the stitches on Ed’s forehead.

“Just seemed like you needed one,” he said.

It was a pretty colossal dick move to turn that down, so Ed put his hand out and let Russell deposit the cupcake in it.

“Thanks,” he said.  “That’s really nice of you.”

“Sure thing,” Russell said.

And with that, Ed turned towards an eyebrow-raising Roy, walked past him, and led the way out of the Twilight Zone.

“Didn’t he work with you?” Roy asked once they were a societally-acceptable and earshot-proof distance away out on the sidewalk.

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “In some kind of alternate universe, I think, ’cause he was like a completely different person then.”

“Sometimes people change,” Roy said.  “And sometimes people grow.”

Ed peeled a little bit of the paper back off of the cupcake and took a bite.  Fucking cupcakes _looked_ cute and all, but there was no way to get a good mouthful-ratio of icing and substance without compromising the structural integrity of the whole thing.

This one was, like this place’s coffee, definitely worth consuming all the same.

“Y’wan’ sh’m?” he asked, proffering it even though that was probably stupid, and Roy wasn’t even really that into swe—

Roy caught his wrist gently to stop him walking, then held it still, leaned in, and nibbled off an impossibly neat little segment.

And then he licked icing off of his fucking lips—slow and meticulous and absolutely fucking sensual, because he wanted Ed to die standing right there outside of the fucking Apple store with a cupcake in his outstretched hand.

“Thank you,” Roy said.

“Thank _you_ ,” Ed managed faintly.

  


* * *

  


The thing that was so fucking unsettling was the ongoing struggle to figure out if any boundaries had changed.

It wasn’t like Ed _wanted_ to be awkward or something; it wasn’t like he didn’t want to drop right back into the intertwining patterns they’d established so fucking beautifully right from the start.  It was just that he wasn’t sure if you were… supposed to, or whatever.  If something was supposed to be different.  If you were supposed to be more careful, or more reserved; or if you had to make sure to state that you were fucking grateful every five minutes; or if there was some kind of an assigned quota of meters of eggshell-walking you had to put in before you could relax again.  Was it like a probationary period or some shit?

He’d never done this—this off-then-back-on thing.  Every time a relationship had ended, it had been in a giant fucking fiery meteor of disaster that had wiped out an entire paleontological era and shaken him to the fucking core and forced him to reassemble his psyche from the shattered fucking pieces.  There was no _Just kidding, I’m sorry_ in Ed’s vocabulary for shit like this.  Either you were in, and you were with someone; or you were out, and you weren’t; and that barrier wasn’t permeable.  It was an Edphobic layer of cells that wouldn’t let him pass between, and that was _good_ , right?  It was better for you emotionally to be clear about that sort of fucking thing.  It was better to create distinct categories in your life and stick to them, so that you could keep track of where you stood with people, which was really the only reliable way of measuring who you we—

“Ed,” Roy said as they drove, very gently brushing his knuckles against Ed’s knee—and then withdrawing his hand when Ed flinched, which made Ed hate himself extra-much for the moment.  “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” Ed said, because Ed was a stupid asshole.  “Just… haven’t been getting a whole lot of sleep on Al’s and Win’s couch and shit.”

Roy smiled faintly.  Ed hesitated.  Then he reached out, grabbed the hand ranging back towards the steering wheel, and put it back on his knee, more firmly this time.  Roy’s smile strengthened.

“I haven’t been sleeping especially well either,” the progressively-smugger—so at least he wasn’t feeling _too_ bad—bastard said.  “Though I assure you I’m awake enough to drive.”

“Good to know,” Ed said.  “Thanks for the heads up.  One car accident a week just isn’t enough for me; I gotta live on the _edge_ of the edge.”  Roy started to laugh softly, but— “Ah, shit.  I just realized—all my shit is over there.  At Al’s and Win’s place, I mean.  My toothbrush and shit.”

“Would you like to do that first?” Roy asked.  “I can get us there inadvisably quickly, if you’d like.”

“Sure,” Ed said.  “And don’t you fucking dare.”  He paused for another second, and then he shifted his hand until the tips of his fingers had crept up to lie on top of Roy’s.  “I didn’t—y’know.  Plan for this.  Exactly.  I didn’t figure you were gonna talk me out of it.”

“Once or twice,” Roy said, “I’ve been told I’m fairly persuasive.”

“I’ll bet,” Ed said.  “But I’m so fucking stubborn Al once cut me off in the middle of an argument, went to his room, slammed the door, and came back out with a new cover for the Meatloaf album ‘Bat Out of Hell’—that he’d Photoshopped to say ‘Mule Out of Hell’—and said ‘Here, this is your first single.’”

Roy laughed a little more, and then regrettably had to extract his hand to make a U-turn.  “He should have made you a T-shirt, at least.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “And a coffee mug, and a trucker hat, and bath towel.”

“Theme your whole life,” Roy said.

“Copyright it as my personal slogan,” Ed said.

Roy glanced over at him long enough to smile.

It finally didn’t feel fucking weird to smile back.

  


* * *

  


When they pulled up in front of the apartment, Winry had Ed’s Civic in the driveway, with the hood propped up.  She was leaned over the front bumper to examine the engine, and the wrench in the back pocket of her cargo shorts—which had, by the look of it, until recently been Al’s cargo shorts—was weighing them down far enough to leave a long curve of her back visible where her white tank top had ridden up.

She looked up, nudged the back of one hand across her cheek, and smeared grease everywhere, and then she used that hand to wave at them while she beamed.

Ed glanced over at Roy, who looked like a deer in the fucking headlights even though Ed’s car was resting nice and dormant.

“Oh,” Ed said.  “Right.  This is you being bi, isn’t it?”

Roy swallowed.  “Something like that,” he said.  “Suffice to say your brother is a lucky man.”

“Stop ogling my fucking pseudo-sister,” Ed said.

“I’ll ogle you later,” Roy said.  “I promise.”

“You know,” Ed said, getting out, “she’d probably let you take a picture if you asked.”

“Asked what?” Winry said.

“Sorry,” Roy said.  “You’re gorgeous.”

“You’re just staying that because I advocated for you when Nerdface over here kept insisting he was done with the whole thing,” Winry said, but she looked _way_ too pleased with herself to mean it.

“I wish I was that devious,” Roy said.  “Just an observation—no harm meant.”

“Eh,” Winry said.  “I got the hint when Al suddenly went all red and said he had to go inside for a while and ‘do some stuff or—something—or—things.’”

“Ah, yes,” Roy said sagely.  “The something-or-things.”

“Good thing I’m getting out of your damn way,” Ed said, starting up the walk.  “I smell a romantic candlelit dinner and, like, two hours of recited poetry.”

“Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it,” Winry said.

Ed turned to Roy, who was trailing a few steps behind with his hands in his pockets.

“Don’t you dare,” Ed said.

“Wouldn’t perchance to dream of it,” Roy said.

Ed gave him a look.

Roy winked.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those that missed my edit to the Tumblr post or the chapter tally on AO3 (which… I mean, tiny after-the-fact stuff, so probably all of you! XD), I epic-failed at this fic again and didn't realize that it has 5 chapters in total instead of 4. So… see y'all next weekend after all. :'D I may try to post this sucker on Saturday, because [Roy/Ed Week](http://royedweek.tumblr.com) starts Sunday! \o/
> 
> Also: Huge, huge, messy bear-hug shout-out to Emma, who has been liveblogging her reading of several parts of this fic to me over IM, which has been an unremitting delight. :D ♥
> 
> Also-also: There is pr0nz in this chapter (*not-so-subtle wink to those of you who were hoping for it* XD), and a bit of setup for the next part follows it, but you can skip the scene itself if that's not your ~~twelfth~~ cup of ~~coffee~~ tea!
> 
>  
> 
>  **RECAP:** Present-day!Ed is in Edinburgh, Scotland, finishing up his trip; Gracia asked him to call her to talk about the Roy situation. Past-tense!Ed and Roy just made up and are retrieving Ed's things from Al's and Winry's place, and everything feels a little bit unsettled.
> 
>  

It’s seven forty local time.  If he gets his shit together in a hurry and maybe runs a little bit, he could be back to the hotel by eight and catch Gracia right at the start of her lunch.

He asks the waiter for the—check?  Bill?  Whatever fucking word they use; the guy figures it out—and leaves an American-sized tip even though he knows he doesn’t have to.  Who fucking cares?  Money’s just a concept.  Money is arbitrary and inherently meaningless; the only currency that matters is the current moment, and what it’s going to deal you, and how you’re going to play your hand.

He thinks for a second that he’s picked the wrong lamplit street, and the deep gray cobblestones might as well part, gape widely, and swallow him forever; he’s never going to find his way out of here, and stopping for directions or something might give his heart so much momentum that it’d burst out of his ribcage once and for all.

Just before he fucking _quits_ —and he hasn’t thought past the quitting part; fuck knows what he’d do afterwards, which is sort of the problem with quitting in the first place—he spots the faint neon glow of the Travelodge sign in the distance, like some kind of tragic excuse for a mystical beacon.  He’s not too distressed about the vague urban squalor thing, though, since he no longer has to figure out a post-quitting plan on the fly.

He lets himself into his room five minutes after eight, drops onto the bed, and fights his phone out of his pocket.

He stares at the dull, distorted contours of his reflection in the screen.

He really—

Doesn’t want to bother her.

Doesn’t want to drag the worst pain in her past right up into today.

Doesn’t want to force her to face more of her own miseries trying to alleviate _his_ —

Who the fuck does he think he is, putting her through that just so that _he_ can feel better about all the secrets he should have been decent enough to dig up a long damn time ago?

He swipes to unlock his phone and then taps over to the email again.

_This is not your fault._

She doesn’t know that; she can’t know that, but—

All the same—

It’s a nice fucking thought, isn’t it?

Maybe he’s entitled to a nice thought.

Just this once.

The upshot is, his phone bill is going to be such a fucking nightmare that it’ll make the rest of this experience look much less shitty in comparison.

He scrolls through his contacts, selects her name, and taps to dial.  He raises the phone to his ear, and bites down hard on his bottom lip, and waits.

It rings once—twi—

“Hi, Ed,” Gracia’s voice says.

He manages not to say what he kind of wants to, and what’s irrefutably fucking true— _I really, really need a mom right now_.

“Hi,” he says instead.  “I—thanks.”

That’s pretty close.

“Not at all,” she says softly.  “Where do you want to start?”

Good fucking question, actually.

He lays his phone-free arm over his eyes to block out the light.  “I… dunno.  I guess—I mean, did you have to deal with it, with him?  With—knowing he’d done things you could barely… imagine, let alone _forgive_ , let alone…”

“Sometimes I did,” she says.  “When he was deployed, we used to talk through a very early video service when we could, or over the phone.  And sometimes, if there wasn’t anyone around, he used to tell me the specifics.”  She sighs—softly, but it’s the kind that catches barbed hooks on your insides and twists them up around each other.  “If you’d known him… He was the most—effusive, the most _effervescent_ person I think that anyone had ever had the startling pleasure of meeting.  Like the personification of a sun.  You could stand nearby and just bask in him sometimes.”

She pauses.  He waits.

“When he got there,” she says, “he had to reconcile that with the things they were asking him to do.  His two identities were as much at war as the countries involved—because he’d always been ferociously smart and incredibly incisive, too.  I’d always guessed that the explosiveness of his enthusiasm was as much a reaction to that—a compensation, maybe, or a counterbalance—as it was a smokescreen, but it could serve as both.  He loved—so much, so wholeheartedly.  But he was brilliant, too, in that and underneath it.  And he was a soldier.  And now he had to find a way for all of those things to coexist.”

“And so did you,” Ed says.

“Exactly,” Gracia says.  “And that isn’t… that isn’t, by any means, an easy thing, or a simple thing—sometimes it might not be possible.  Because it’s not just right and wrong—not with something like this; not with the kind of things that happen out there.  Something can _be_ wrong—morally wrong, viscerally wrong—and still be strategically, politically, militarily right.  You can follow policy to the last letter of the fine print and still not feel like you’ve done something you can live with.  The rules are different—almost down to the ones that govern things like gravity.  Combat is like a different world.”

Speculation took him that far.  But how fucking far can you go before you’re making excuses for the actions of someone you love?

“So what’d you do?” he manages.  “I mean, you… stayed married, and stuff, right?”

“Yes,” she says, and he can hear her smiling—but not like she’s laughing at him for being a grown fucking man who can’t string a coherent sentence together.

“The thing—” Ed can’t just sell him out; it’s Roy’s story to tell.  Roy’s secret to reveal.  Whatever the fuck.  “The thing that… Roy did.  It’s—I can’t just… forgive him for it.  I can’t make that call.  It’s not mine to forgive.”

“You don’t have to forgive him,” Gracia says.  “And you’re right—it’s not your prerogative to in the first place.”  She draws a breath and lets it out.  “Don’t forgive him.   _Accept_ him.  If you have it in you, accept what he has in him.  Accept that you’re going to have to help him to carry that, every single day of both of your lives.  And, Ed—you’re well within your rights to decide that you can’t.  It’s an incredible thing; an incredibly difficult thing.  You didn’t ask for this.  And you don’t have to take it.  If you can’t incorporate that part of him into yourself while staying true to who you are—that’s _all right_.  That doesn’t make you weak.  It doesn’t make you cold.  It doesn’t make you a lesser person.  Quite possibly the opposite.”

God, that fucking sounds like something Roy would say.

“What it comes down to,” Gracia says, “is how the scale balances out in your life, Ed.  It could be him or the whole rest of the world from here on out.  If you walk with him, you’re going to have to bear some of the weight—and it’s _heavy_ , and you didn’t choose it, and it’s not your fault.  But it’s there, with him.  And if he’s what you want, you have to find a way to help him hold it.”

Ed opens his mouth to say _He killed people—he_ killed _them_.

Nothing comes out.

He tries to swallow.  “I don’t know—how to—even talk to him.  All this time, he _lied_ —”  That’s not fair.  None of this is fair; the least he can do is not fucking add to it.  “Okay, he didn’t— _lie_ -lie, but—he’s just been—he’s never told me fucking _anything_ ; he’s never—he’s made it so he never fucking had to lie, because he’s never let me get close enough to scrape the fucking truth, and—”

“And it’s a betrayal twice,” Gracia says.  “To find out at the same time that he was capable of it, and that he’s been keeping it from you that he was.”

Ed wants to roll over and bury his face in the comforter—duvet?—but he’s probably on the verge of unintelligibility as it is.  “Y—yeah.  Yeah.  I just—I trusted him with… I relived every single last shitty thing in my past so he’d know it wasn’t _him_ that’d hurt me, and—and all this time, just—”

“I know, hon,” Gracia says softly.  “I know.”

She does.  That’s the worst part.  She _does_ , but there’s nothing anyone can do.

“I’m sorry,” she says.  “I think it was… well.  It was slightly easier, in my case, because he and I went through it together.  Whereas this is something that’s over, and finished, and you have no power to change it.  It just—is.”

“Yeah,” Ed manages.  “Which I hate.”

He can hear her weary little smile.  “I don’t blame you.”

He scrubs his hand down his face and then lets his arm fall to the bed beside him.  “Okay.  I—thank you.  Thank you so fucking much, I mean it; I don’t know… I just didn’t… like, who do you ask about something like this?”

“Me,” Gracia says, forcing a bit of cheer into it.  “And please—you are so much more than welcome.  I’m glad I could be here.  I suppose it’s a bit of a stretch to say I helped.”

“You did,” Ed says, meaning it.  “Just knowing you’d _get_ it—and you wouldn’t think I was a piece of shit—helped a lot.”

“You should talk it out with him,” Gracia says.

“Yeah,” Ed says.

“But only after you’ve figured out how _you_ feel,” she says, “before he’s tried to change your mind—intentionally or otherwise.”

Ed winces.  It’s true, isn’t it?  It’s fucking true.  Roy’s so good at convincing people—at _conning_ them, at steering them and shepherding them—that he practically does it in his sleep.

It’s great when Ed feels like crap, and the bastard can make him forget the whole lousy-ass mood and make it feel like it was his idea in the bargain.  It’s not so great at times like right now, when Ed has to worry that Roy will instinctively try to affect his decision-making—probably so subtly that Roy won’t even realize it himself.  Probably so subtly that he’ll be doing his honest damnedest to give Ed distance and respect his point of view, but there’ll be a pull beneath the surface that neither of them will even see.  A current.  An undertow.  Subliminal, subconscious, subversive, and fucking inescapable.

“Jesus,” Ed says.

He remembers too late that Gracia actually believes in Jesus.  Well—God-Jesus-working-miracles, rather than just historical-Jesus-getting-shit-done-in-the-desert.

Maybe she either won’t notice or won’t mind.  He’s had such a shitty-ass run of luck these past couple days that somethinghas to go right, doesn’t it?  That’s just fucking probability.

“Anyway,” he says, because nothing saves a social faux pas quite like an awkward, obvious segue; “I—thank you.”

“Really,” she says.  “Don’t mention it.  And don’t you dare hesitate to send me a text or another email any time if you want my two cents while you’re sorting this out, okay?”

It’s no wonder he didn’t get to keep his mom: he’s not worthy of one.  Not of one like his was, or one like Gracia is.  He’s not good enough—never has been or will be or _could_ be—to earn this.

“Okay,” he says, like he could possibly bring himself to waste any more of her precious time—to take any more of it away from her, when she has so little left to keep to herself and spend the way she wants to.  “I’ll… thank you.”  He isn’t supposed to mention it.  “Oh, uh—sorry.  But—well.  I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

“Okay,” she says.  “Take care, Ed.”

“You, too,” he says.  “Give the punk my best until I can give it to her myself.”

“Sure thing,” Gracia says.  “Travel safe, hon.”

There’s a round of the requisite ’bye-circle, and then Ed hangs up.

He holds his phone up and stares at the screen for a second until it feels too heavy for his arm.

Staring at the ceiling and questioning the entire trajectory of his lousy fucking existence is almost as good as progress.  Nothing pathetic about that, right?

Right.

  


* * *

  


Al was draped across the couch with one foot up on the coffee table, the better to lean his textbook against his thigh; and the other lowered so that the cat could sprawl on the available half of his lap.  He glanced up when Ed and Roy walked in, blinked twice, and then started to grin like he’d won the lottery or some shit.

“Hello, Brother,” he said.  “Hello, Roy.”

“Hi, Al,” Ed said.  He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.  “He just hit on your girlfriend.”

“I didn’t _hit on_ her,” Roy said—a touch hastily, Ed felt.  “I merely… expressed… admiration.”

“While drooling,” Ed said.

“I did no such thing,” Roy said.

Ed wanted to keep going—wanted to tell him drooling was okay, actually, since he was clearly in the doghouse, and dogs drooled all the time; wanted to rib him until they both ran out of shit to say.  It didn’t actually bother him in the slightest, which was why he was up to joking about it in the first place; he was _glad_ Winry was so beautiful she stopped traffic sometimes, but she was dating somebody like Al who loved and appreciated her for so much more than that.  And he was glad that Al, who was perfect, had the hottest-if-you-swung-that-way girlfriend on the block—or any other block within at least a thousand miles or so.

But he didn’t want to push too hard.

He didn’t want to go too fucking far.

All the boundaries in his life had just flexed, warped, and then contracted, realigning into unfamiliar shapes.  He didn’t know what was sacred or uncertain anymore; he didn’t know what was fair game.

And maybe it… _did_ bother him.  Just a little; just a tiny needle prick at the back of his neck, like a premonition of bee-sting.  Just a faint discomfort—an itch, a rash, a scratch from a sharp object, and whether it would bleed or not was anybody’s guess.

“Ed?” Roy said, and the world’s finest left hand reached towards his shoulder and then hesitated with two inches to spare.  “I didn’t… You know that I—”

“Let me go get my shit,” Ed said, starting for the bathroom, and the two inches turned to fifteen feet in a matter of strides, and the distance smoldered at first—and then it burned, and then it fell to aching fucking ashes.

“Hold this,” Al was saying from the living room while Ed gathered up his toothbrush and his razor and tried to think of more things to fiddle with while he forced his brain to stop shivering with useless-ass ideas that he _knew_ weren’t true.

There were footsteps in the hall, and then Al was in the doorway, down a kitten and up a frown.

“Brother,” he said, very softly, “it’s okay to be a little scared.”

Ed’s face must’ve said everything his voice wasn’t up to, because Al started waving his hands.

“Unsettled,” he corrected.  “Unbalanced.  Whatever you like—it’s _okay_.  You’ve been through a lot in the last few days, and this is a new thing for you.”

Ed resisted the urge to hurl his toothbrush into his little zippered toiletries-and-shit bag for emphasis, since that was the sort of thing that would somehow end with his toothbrush ricocheting off into the bacteria-coated ether.

“What?” he said.  “Fucking it up almost past repair, but not quite?”

“Forgiving yourself,” Al said.  “Letting yourself have something you want even though you don’t think you deserve it.  And—well, yes.  Getting back together with someone’s never been… wise… for you before.  But in this case, I think it’s very healthy that you’re acknowledging that even if this isn’t perfect all the time, it’s still _good_ , and important, and far from ruined.”

Ed realized too late that he was clutching his fucking toothbrush like a lifeline.  “But it—just—everything’s different.  Just a _little_ , but…” He put the toothbrush in the Zipoc and the Ziploc in the bag, and then he braced one hand on the counter and shoved the other through his hair.  “Al, what the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Be you,” Al said, smiling slightly.  “That’s all he wants.”

Ed’s face must have been very communicative again, because Al stepped forward and hauled him into a hug.

“You,” Al said, “are wonderful.  Okay?  You don’t have to prove anything.  You don’t have to make any promises; you don’t have to make any apologies.  Just go, and be with him, and be you.  That’s the point.”

Ed banged his forehead—gently—against Al’s shoulder.  The kid needed to put some weight on; he was so bony it still kind of hurt.

“Thanks, Al,” he said.

“Always,” Al said.  “I mean that.”

  


* * *

  


Once Roy had handed the cat back to its rightful worshipper-slash-owner, and Ed had tossed all of his remaining miscellaneous crap back into his suitcase, and Roy had very pointedly kept his gaze above Winry’s clavicles while she confirmed her initial prognosis that the damage to Ed’s car wasn’t an especially gnarly fix, it was just a matter of a few minutes’ drive before they were on Roy’s doorstep.

Ed had been thinking of it as his own damn doorstep three fucking days ago.  This whole thing had just been like an earthquake inside his brain—everything shaken down; everything cracked and splintered and displaced—

He’d jumped out of Roy’s car despite the misgivings, because otherwise Roy was going to try to take his suitcase, regardless of the fact that success in that department would only take place over Ed’s dead body.  And then Roy was holding the door—whoever’s it was—and then they were inside, and then…

Roy closed the door, paused, locked it, turned to Ed, and smiled softly.

“Thank you,” he said.

Ed hated this—the awkwardness; himself, for _making_ it awkward.  He swallowed and managed not to toy with the handle of the suitcase like a fucking moron.  “For what?”

“For giving us another chance,” Roy said, and—there it was; there was the ghost-light touch of his fingertips to Ed’s face, throat, shoulder; _God_ , it felt so good—

Ed reached out with both hands and latched one on to each side of Roy’s stupid button-down shirt and pulled him in closer, and—was he allowed to fucking kiss him yet, or—?

Roy let out a soft breath as a sigh against Ed’s mouth, eyes flicking up to his, and was he wondering the same fucking thing…?

Ed tugged a little on the captured collar, and the corners of Roy’s mouth quirked up, and Ed might’ve licked his lips, and then Roy’s were sealing over them, so he didn’t fucking care anymore.

Roy must have been waiting, too—he didn’t waste any fucking time; his mouth was open; the press of his tongue against and around Ed’s was urgent, somehow; and he made a noise in the back of his throat like maybe he was drowning—

And it was kind of fucked up, wasn’t it, how you could starve for affection so viscerally that it really was a _hunger_ —a desperate, gnawing need that started in the pit of your stomach and radiated outward until your hands shook with it, and the hollowness of craving it was just too much to bear.

Ed twisted his hands tighter into Roy’s shirtfront—right at the same instant Roy’s hands settled on his waist and gently guided him back against the wall.

Roy drew back just far enough to murmur against his mouth: “Was it only two days?”

“Two days,” Ed said, and Roy’s eyelashes were fucking mesmerizing this close; “each of which contained a pretty significant portion of forever.”

Roy’s eyes flicked up and back down, scanning Ed’s face.  “That sounds about right.”

“Clever of us,” Ed said.  “Fucking with the time-space continuum like that.”

Roy curled his hand and grazed his knuckles down Ed’s cheek, batting Ed’s bangs back gently.

“Exceedingly clever,” he said.  “Though I’d posit it is even exceedingly cleverer of us to have reneged.”

“Universe can’t sustain that sort of shit for too long anyway,” Ed said, which was better than just melting right the fuck into the touch.

“I’ll sustain _your_ universe,” Roy said, grinning, and then he dove back into a kiss right as Ed started laughing, so that their breaths tangled together, and the motion of Ed’s chest expanding rippled through them both.

If there was a feeling in the fucking world more buoyant than this, Ed had yet to find it.

Roy took a step backward, one hand delving into Ed’s hair, the other spreading on the small of his back, and drew him in, and down the entryway, and around the corner, and into the living room, and then Roy was sitting on the couch, and Ed was climbing up to straddle him, and Roy’s mouth migrated down his throat to his collarbones, and his soft breath tickled and felt like _heaven_ all at once—

And Roy’s hand chafed up and down his back, settled briefly under his right shoulder and massaged with purgatorial precision at the knot right underneath his shoulder-blade, and then twined itself into his hair.  He arched his back, gritting his teeth at the spike of pain from the pressure on the tension, and Roy’s mouth paused where it was sliding damply up the side of his neck.

“Might’ve been—” Ed ground out as the spearhead edges of the first burst of it subsided into little sparks.  “—a tiny bit—stressed.”

Roy nipped gently, and _that_ pain was in an entirely different category.  “Maybe we can fix that,” he said, and the movement of his lips on Ed’s skin—

 _Fuck_ —

Except—

The beat of Ed’s pulse wasn’t hot enough to set his blood to steaming.  The pull came from the center of his chest, not the pit of his stomach—not the midpoint of volcanic impetus behind his hips.

This wasn’t lust: it was longing.  He didn’t want to get fucked six ways from Sunday; he just wanted to be held until he’d forgotten all the worst of it.

But they were supposed to have makeup sex, weren’t they?  That was how it worked.  There was a fight, and then there was a reclamation, and that was the resolution of it, and if he didn’t do this part right—

Roy’s mouth ranged up over his ear; Roy’s fingers raked through his hair—tugging out the tie, carding through the tangles, smoothing it down his back—and that felt so fucking good that he couldn’t help closing his eyes to savor it.

“Sweetheart,” Roy whispered.

How did that always sound kind instead of condescending?

The hand that wasn’t wound up in his hair swept across the small of his back again, and a finger curled into one of his belt loops.

Roy’s mouth settled right at the juncture of his neck and his jaw.  “Are you sure you’re feeling up for this?” 

 _Yes,_ Ed thought intently.  _Yes, yes; say ‘yes’, go the fuck on and_ say _it._

“I’ll get into it,” he said.

Mother _fucker_.

“I mean,” he said, staring up at the ceiling so he wouldn’t have to look at Roy, “I _am_ ; I just—just give me a—minute; it’ll—I’m almost there; it’ll be fine—”

“Oh, my God,” Roy said softly, and Ed froze, because if that wasn’t the sound of a man preparing to kick his dumb ass to the curb—maybe even halfway across the street—he’d be damned at least twice.

Except that Roy was wriggling around and hiking Ed’s weight up and then flipping them so they were lying on the couch, and then—

Hauling him into a tight hug with his head fitted just underneath Roy’s chin.

“The bad news is,” Roy said, “you’re going to have to put up with my octopus impression.”

“S’okay,” Ed said through the several mollusks in his throat.  “I like cephalopods.”

“Mmm,” Roy breathed, and then he kissed the top of Ed’s head, which was wonderful and disgusting in about equal proportion.  “You may regret that statement a few hours into the marathon hugging.”

“Eugh,” Ed said.  “I might.”

He probably wouldn’t, though.

  


* * *

  


Unsurprisingly—between the cocktail of gratitude and relief and the bouts of dozing with his cheek crushed against Roy’s chest—Ed completely lost track of time, but he would have been willing to bet it was well over an hour before Roy really stirred.

“I promised you tea, didn’t I?” he murmured in answer to Ed’s bleary incoherent noise.  “And at this rate, I’d better promise you some dinner.”

“S’okay,” Ed managed.  He assessed the situation as his body fumbled around, numb pieces individually trying to remember how blood flowed and breath moved and life took place.  “Gotta pee, or I’m gonna die, though.”

Tactful eloquence had always been his forte, after all.

He didn’t even have time to feel properly embarrassed before Roy kissed his forehead and helped him sit up.  “Get thee to a lavatory posthaste.  Chamomile or mint?”

“Surprise me,” Ed said.

“Between chamomile and mint?” Roy asked, standing from the couch and then offering Ed both hands.  “Or with the weirdest flavor combination that I have?”

Ed looked up at him—at the gorgeous fucking perfect fucking obnoxious dork who had _insisted_ that they should stagger around on the deck of this stupid sinking ship called life together, rather than alone.

“I don’t even care,” he said, and took Roy’s hands.

  


* * *

  


“How does Thai delivery and a documentary sound to you?” Roy asked over the huffing of the tea kettle when Ed returned from his overdue sojourn to the bathroom.

“It sounds like I died,” Ed said, “and need to revise my opinions on theology.”

“You may not need to go that far,” Roy said, but the pleased expression sort of gave him away.

  


* * *

  


If Ed let shit go on like this, people were going to start thinking he was a cuddler.  That was an unacceptable blight on his tough-motherfucker persona; scrappy kids who had had to fight for every last damn thing in their lives didn’t end up swooning over touchy-feely shit on the couch with their significant other, no matter how significantly hot the other was.  Ed had to put a stop to it—he _would_ , in fact.  He would put his foot down and extract himself from the tangle of limbs and swear off snuggling for good, forever, for the betterment of his image and reputation and dignity and so on and so forth.

…in, like, five more minutes.  Give or take.

“Oh, hell,” Roy said as the credits rolled.  “I just saw ‘driver’ go by and remembered—I meant to ask you if you needed any help with your insurance company.  From what Winry said, it sounds like it should be pretty cut and dry, but I’ve never known insurance to be very good at either.”

Ed was having trouble with that idiom right now.  He was going to have to Google it later and figure out what the origin was, because at the moment he was imagining a State Farm neighbor or that really perky girl from Progressive marking off sections of his car and then cutting it with chainsaws and hanging it up on a clothesline.

Probably he needed more sleep.

“Yeah,” he said, before realizing that that was—of course—sort of an ambiguous answer to sort of the wrong part of what Roy had said.  “I mean—I think it’s fine.  I’ll call ’em again tomorrow.  Eventually they’ll get sick of me and just deal with it.”  He nudged his shoulder at Roy’s arm around him.  “Might need somebody noble and nice and shit to give me rides, though.”

“Oh, I’ll give you _rides_ ,” Roy said, and there was the fabled smirk again, and Ed’s heart actually fluttered, which was gross.  “But—Lord, yes, of course.  Anything you need.”

Ed had everything he needed.  The rest of it was a different fucking ballgame, though.

“Awesome,” he said, and dropped his head on Roy’s shoulder again—just for five minutes or whatever.

Roy stroked a hand through the hair trailing from the hasty half-bun-half-ponytail-abomination-thing clinging partway up the back of Ed’s head like a mushroom cap on a tree trunk, which had abruptly become necessary when he’d been about to get oyster sauce in the dangling ends.

“Are you all right?” Roy asked.  “It usually takes longer than this for the carbs to knock you out.”

“S’fine,” Ed said.  “Just… bottoming out on all the adrenaline and shit.”

Roy kept stroking evenly, but the pause turned into a silence, and Ed set his jaw in anticipation.  Of course he wasn’t out of the fucking woods.  He never was.

Maybe there was no out.  Maybe the forest just went on forever.

“Have you ever thought about getting treatment for your anxiety?” Roy asked softly.

“I don’t have anxiety,” Ed said.

This pause resonated, too—with a nice little ring of mild disbelief.

“I mean,” Ed said, “I have _anxieties_ —fuckin’ shit-ton of those—but I don’t have a _disorder_.”

Roy pulled back to look at him, which was a signed, sealed, delivered confirmation that he’d screwed the fucking pooch on that one pretty good.

“Edward,” Roy said, very gently, which was an even surer sign; “I’m not—trying to—make you do anything, or even _say_ anything, or—”

“I’m fine,” Ed said.

“That isn’t the question,” Roy said, and there was a weird sort of sadness to his little smile.  “Although I know it’s your answer for everything.  I know it always has been—going it alone and unaided is just about your trademark by now.  But would it hurt so much to consider that you might be _more_ fine if you addressed the possibility that—”

The words came out of the core of Ed’s being so fast he didn’t have the chance to think them over before they’d been spoken.  “I don’t have time not to be fine,” he said.  “And I don’t have the money, and nobody should get special treatment, is the thing—is my thing; that’s my thing; you play the hand you get dealt, and win or lose, that’s what you get.  Just ’cause I—people deal with shit all the time.  People deal with _worse_ shit all the time.  Just because I’m bad at dealing with it doesn’t mean I should get to make excuses or freak the fuck out or—”

Roy touched the back of his hand, which might or might not have clenched itself tight in the fabric of his jeans while he wasn’t looking.  He snapped his mouth shut—too late, but that was nothing new.

“What if it was Al?” Roy asked.

“It’s not Al,” Ed said.

“Thought experiment,” Roy said.  “What if it was Al, and he had to feel like you do on a semi-regular basis?  What if he was scared of what it meant, and what it meant about who he was?  What would you tell him?”

Ed set his jaw.  “It’s not Al.”

“But if it was,” Roy said, “would you tell him that he was irrational, or exaggerating, or just not coping well enough?  Would you tell him it was his fault?  Would you tell him to tough it out?”

Swallowing was getting to be a fucking trial again.  “I—”

“Would you tell him,” Roy said, “that his pain didn’t matter?”  He worked Ed’s fingers gently loose of the jeans and clasped Ed’s hand between his two.  “Or would you see about dealing him another card that might make the hand he got a little bit easier to play?”

Ed breathed in and out slowly, because giving Roy more evidence for that argument was the absolute worst strategy in the vast array of crappy choices.  “It’s not—I mean, I can—handle it.  I can probably even—fix it, I—”

Roy raised one of his hands and smoothed his fingertips back along Ed’s cheek.

“Do you think my various and sundry problems with post-traumatic stress mean that there’s something wrong with me?” he asked.

“Of course not,” Ed said, because—duh.

Roy looked at him.  _Significantly_.

“Shut up,” Ed said.

“It’s not about fixing,” Roy said.  “It’s about helping.  Life’s hard enough.”

“I noticed that part,” Ed said, and if his voice sort of quavered a little—

Well, it didn’t, obviously.

Roy leaned their foreheads together, closing his eyes.

“You don’t have to be Superman,” he said.

“Good,” Ed managed.  “I’d make a shitty journalist.”

Roy cracked an eye open.  “Ah.  How about—Bruce Banner?”

“You’re damn right,” Ed said.  “I’m fucking _huge_.”

“I thought that was only when you’re angry,” Roy said.  He unleashed the cheesiest grin ever produced or witnessed by a human being.  “Or when you’re really happy to see me, if you know what I me—”

Ed shoved his shoulder.  “Mustang!”

Roy lifted their still-tangled hands and kissed Ed’s knuckles.  “In the spirit of honesty,” he said, “I will not pretend to apologize.”  He looked up with his mouth still hovering tantalizing centimeters over Ed’s skin, but his eyes had gone all serious again.  “Ed—”

“I mean—” The thud of his own heartbeat in his ears was like war drums these days; like a death knell tolling ever fucking faster.  He knew.  He _knew_ he couldn’t just soldier on forever; he knew you could only burn the candle in three or five or nineteen places for so long before you ended up with cold fuses and a puddle of wax.  “I just—don’t know how to—do anything else.”

“I know,” Roy said, barely audible, and then he was gathering Ed up into a giant fucking hug again, so at least that was all right.  “Believe me; I know.”

  


* * *

  


Ed had drifted—

Well, no.

Ed had dropped into sleep last night like a fucking lead-coated stone on some extremely heavy crack.

But he’d done it wrapped up in Roy’s arms either way, which was the important part—wrapped up and _spooned_ , no less, which was a crime against any last little cowering remnants of dignity he might have had.

Whatever.

He’d needed the fucking sleep pretty badly; apparently he’d slept straight through—at the very least—Roy extracting himself from the Gordian knot of limbs and torsos in order to roll over onto his front and bury his face in the pillow.  That was probably much better for your circulatory system in the long run that letting somebody sleep on top of your arm.  It was good that Roy had made that call, because he had excellent arms, and excellent legs, and hands, and feet, and… other appendages… and Ed really didn’t want to see any of them have to get amputated.

Ed blinked.  His morning brain was a weird-ass fucking place.

He blinked again.  The light looked like… maybe mid-morning?  And it had this incredible sort of softening effect on the white bedclothes; and Roy’s hair looked like spilt ink; and the stain had flowed gracefully over the back of his neck, and Ed wanted nothing more than to kiss the little nub of his first vertebra.

And he _could_ , now.  He fucking could again.  He was fucking entitled; he was encouraged; he was…

Home.  He was home.

He was home, and safe, and within touching distance of Roy, who _wanted_ him there.

That was a giddy fucking feeling.

Man, mornings were great—the warm-fuzzies were swarming inside Ed’s chest like a cloud of fireflies, but none of the guilt or reason or better judgment or second-guessing circuits had woken up yet.

He shifted over, as quietly as he could, and looked at the clock.  It was just a little after eight.  That was late enough to count as sleeping in by a pretty significant margin, so it wouldn’t be rude to ruin it, right?

Well.  “Ruin” it.  If he fucked this up anything less than royally, he doubted the word _ruin_ would make an appearance from Roy’s expansive vocabulary to describe any of what followed.

He peeled the sheets back carefully, just a couple inches at a time.  Roy squirmed, then stilled, then huffed out a breath against the pillowcase, but he didn’t wake up.

Ed drew the sheets down far enough to expose most of the soft-worn T-shirt rather unfairly hiding the curved planes of Roy’s back, and then he hiked himself up and over to settle with one knee on either side of Roy’s waist.  Then he leaned in and started kneading very gently at the spot low on the back of Roy’s neck where all the tension usually lived.

The tension, as far as tenancy, did not disappoint.

Ed thought it was a pretty fucking good tactic, all things considered: objectively very few downsides and a lot of opportunity.  After about five seconds of soft, sleepy, incoherent mumbling into the pillow, a particularly deep press with his knuckle coaxed Roy over the boundary from still-dozing to decidedly awake.  He turned his head, and one of of those impossibly gorgeous fucking eyes slid open, and it fixed on Ed with the world’s single most knee-cartilage-melting fucking smolder—and he’d seen a few.

“Did I die?” Roy murmured, and the throaty roughness of his voice just about did for the rest of Ed’s bones—liquid; he was fucking liquid straight through; he needed medical help and maybe a slightly less stupefyingly hot boyfriend.

“Not that I know of,” Ed said.  “But you might if you keep using fucking lines on me.”

Roy’s grin sparked a glimmer in his eye before it ever moved his cheek.  “If you want me to stop comparing you to an angel, you’re going to have to dye your hair.”

Ed wrinkled his nose.  This was why he didn’t let his stupid fucking hair down in front of the likes of Roy any more often than he had to, but he’d been starting to get a bitch of a headache last night from all of the assorted crying and reading and not-sleeping and shit.

“Okay,” he said.  “What color’s least angelic?”

“Black,” Roy said.

Ed reached forward and tugged gently at a stupidly pretty little lock curling against the back of Roy’s neck.  “Then what the fuck happened to you?”

Roy snorted into the pillow.  Which was cute.

“Never mind,” Ed said.  “I had plans for you.”

Roy twisted his hips just enough to rub his ass against Ed’s groin, which—

Well.

Shit.

“Did you,” Roy said.

“Maybe,” Ed said, and his voice might possibly have come out a tiny bit strangled, but that could’ve been a coincidence.

“Mmm,” Roy said for good measure, because he was a bastard, and he knew all of Ed’s fucking weak spots.  “Tell me more about these ‘plans’.”

Maybe he’d forgotten that one of Ed’s weak spots was dirty talk, since generating it was pretty much tantamount to climbing Everest with a toothpick for a walking stick, as far as Ed was concerned.

“Um,” Ed managed.  Fortunately, his morning brain hadn’t geared up enough to produce the swirls of shame that usually accompanied this kind of harmless-but-still-humiliating only-Roy-would-know embarrassment.  “I dunno.”

Wait, there was a coil of it—tight and throbbing, stabbing a sharp end through the bottom of his diaphragm, dulling the heat roiling in the pit of his stomach into a low, low endangered little flame.

Roy started shifting in earnest, and Ed had to tilt his weight forward to get up higher on his knees so that there was room for Roy to move under him, and then Roy rolled over, and then his hands darted up to settle on Ed’s hips like they fucking belonged there, and that—

Helped.

“I could make a few suggestions,” Roy said.

“I bet,” Ed said.  “You tend to be pretty suggestive.”

Roy’s grin widened until it was hard to look at.  Fucker had no right being so _cute_ on top of everything else.  What a goddamn cheat.

“Guilty as charged,” he said.  He lifted both hands from Ed’s hips, the better to hold them out to Ed with his wrists together.  “Lock me up, Officer.”

Ed batted his hands back down—gently, though.  “If you’re lookin’ for authority, you’re in the wrong damn place.”

Roy spread his rejected palms on Ed’s thighs and smoothed them slowly up and down.  “ _Au contraire, mon amour_ ,” he said.  “I can think of nowhere on Earth I’d rather be.”

Ed was going to vomit.  Whether the expectorate would be barf or butterflies was still an open question.

“You know,” he said, “you’re damn lucky I put up with all your mushy shit.”

“Darling,” Roy said, drawing his hands languidly up Ed’s sides—and not-exactly-accidentally dragging Ed’s T-shirt with them; “that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along.”

Ed blinked, automatically raising his arms so Roy could peel the shirt off of him.  “That you’re mushier than an overripe tomato and shit?”

Roy’s hands skated slowly back down over his chest.

“No,” Roy said, and he had that almost-secret little smile on again.  “That I’m lucky.”

“Well,” Ed said, “you’re about to _get_ lucky, anyway.”

Roy’s eyes lit up in a wholly different way.  “Am I indeed?”

It was sort of difficult to respond to someone sincerely saying the word ‘indeed’ in any situation that didn’t involve a period drama, so Ed tried for a combination of a smirk and an enigmatic smile and then scooted back too fast for Roy’s eager hands to catch him, shuffling himself under the covers.  He curled his fingers into the waistband of Roy’s stupid-adorable pajama pants and gave the bastard time for one sharp gasp of comprehension before pulling them down.

The tail end of the gasp metamorphosed into a low, throaty, absolutely fucking _world_ -shattering groan, which might’ve been Roy’s way of getting revenge for the fact that Ed had just applied a very warm tongue to his half-hard dick.

The great thing about blowjobs was that as long as you could keep your teeth out of the way, you didn’t actually need much technique: if you just sort of gradually increased the speed and the suction, you were pretty much golden, and most guys worth sucking off proved vocal enough to give you any other guidance required along the way.  If you were really lucky, they’d get excited enough to fist a hand in your hair, which felt fucking kickass on top of helping you gauge how fast they wanted it, since usually they used that leverage to move your head _for_ you.

Admittedly, you did have to convince your gag reflex to go on vacation for a while, and that was a little more challenging.  But Ed was into challenges.  That might even have been his defining fucking feature, depending on who you asked.

Point was, Roy was arching his back off of the bed and making these beautiful moaning sounds within a matter of seconds, and Ed was no longer regretting the decision to leave his stupid hair down, because it was trailing all over Roy’s skin as Ed moved, and for someone with a hair fetish as intense as Roy’s, that was probably _heavenly_.

And then—fuck, yes, one of Roy’s hands fumbled to catch his shoulder, then tracked up the side of his neck and delved into his hair, fingers curling just past his temple for a better grip.

“Beautiful,” Roy gasped out, and based on the tone, that was supposed to be a direct address for Ed, despite the fact that it was something of a non sequitur; “if you’re trying to make me desperate for you, you’re doing an e-excellent job.”

Downsides of giving oral included not being able to maintain a steady stream of banter at the same time.  Ed paused, drew back, and then traced just the tip of his tongue in a lazy, wavy line from base to head, grinned when Roy threw his head back and whined in the base of his throat, and then tunneled his fist around Roy’s cock to keep it happy while it waited.

“Not much of an ulterior motive,” he said.  “Just wanted your dick in my mouth.”

The faint, feverish little groan that slipped past Roy’s lips made it more than fucking worth it.

“What a coincidence,” Roy managed.  “I want that very much as well.”

“So shut up and let me work,” Ed said.

“But you see,” Roy said, and then Ed breathed hot on the tip, and the words melted into a whimper before Roy caught his breath again.  “You—see—I also—very much—want to fuck you until we’re both ready to go right back to sleep for the rest of the weekend.”

Ed looked up through his bangs, waited until his eyes fucking _locked_ with Roy’s, and took Roy’s dick in down to the back of his throat.

“Hmm,” he said, trying to make his throat vibrate as much as possible with the sound.

The way Roy’s hips jerked upward was a pretty good indication of success.

“Oh, God,” Roy said, and then his breath hitched, and then he said it again, only softer, and unsteadier— “Oh, _God_.”

Ed pulled up and off, making sure to run his tongue over every fucking centimeter of the underside on the way—and then looked at Roy while he worked his jaw and slowly scrubbed the back of his hand across his mouth to smudge the drool off.

Roy lifted his chin just a little to make sure Ed could see the first beads of sweat gleaming on his throat as he swallowed—hard.

“Come here,” Roy said, voice barely stronger than a whisper, shot through with that harsh crackle like he couldn’t fucking help himself, and Ed’s head spun with how damn hot that was.  It wasn’t like he had a choice in any case; there were magnets in him everywhere, and Roy’s skin was searing sun-kissed metal, and he leaned down, landed in a kiss—

Both of Roy’s hands curled into his hair this time; one dragged out through the length of it, tugging at the tangles as it went; and the other clenched tight right against his scalp until the tingling sent a shudder down his spine.  He let his whole body shiver with it—let the current curve his body right against Roy’s, all the way fucking _down_ —

Roy bit his bottom lip, gently but with fucking meaning, with _intent_ —then drew back, eyelashes rising; smiled like the whole world made fucking sense—

“Ed,” he said.  “I love you.”

In that moment, Ed happened upon the slightly unfortunate discovery that he preferred choking on dick to choking back tears.  There was really no going back from that kind of shit.  To be fair to himself, though, crying was _shit_.  It just was.  No two fucking ways about it.

“Shut up,” he managed.  “You fucking too.  Shut up.”

He’d never had much of any instinct for all of this seduction shit, but something had to be done here, so he went for Roy’s gorgeous throat, kissing open-mouthed.  Roy’s hands tightened in his hair, and that felt fucking killer, so he kept at it—worked his way around and up Roy’s jaw to his ear; breathed into it and nipped carefully at the shell.  How were you supposed to bite somebody without hurting them, anyway?  Roy made it seem so fucking easy, but it _wasn’t_ ; teeth were sharp, and skin was so easy to break instead of nice-bruising or teasing or—

“God,” Roy said again, and he hooked one leg—dumb-cute pajamas still caught on his knee—around the back of Ed’s thigh and ground their hips together, and that was fucking magnificent.

“Fuck me,” Ed said into the sweat-dampened hair at Roy’s temple, pressing his pelvis down.  He’d been putting all his weight on his left arm to support himself anyway; that freed the right to trail down Roy’s chest, nudge itself underneath his shirt, and slide back up slowly—fingers spread, cataloguing and caressing every single line.  “C’mon,” he whispered at the soft noise Roy made through slightly parted lips.  “Hard.  Now.  C’mon.  _Please_.”

Roy twisted far enough to press his cheek to Ed’s; hissed softly through his teeth, then swallowed loud enough for Ed to hear.  “Fuck,” he said, and then he shook one hand loose from Ed’s hair and wrapped it around Ed’s right wrist instead.  He could have it.  Ed didn’t need hands.  Roy could have all of it; everything; every fucking cell of Ed’s body; every impulse— “You,” Roy said, “are incredible.”

Ed wasn’t any such fucking thing, but sometimes—

Sometimes he felt like it, when Roy’s eyes lit like that—when they stayed on him, radiant with the deep heat of fucking desire, as Roy guided Ed’s first two fingers into his mouth and ran that unreasonably fucking talented tongue around them—

Ed’s guts burned; his blood boiled; the velvet slide of Roy’s tongue against his fingertips coaxed a desperate fucking moan out of him—almost more a prayer than a plea.

His hand trembled as Roy made one last wet sweep with his tongue and then drew back—eyes still bright like fucking supernovas, like whole universes had condensed and started to explode.

“Can I watch you open yourself up?” Roy murmured, kissing at the shining glaze of saliva coating Ed’s fingers all the way down to where they met his hand.  “Would you do that for me?”

 _I’d pull down the fucking constellations and crumple them for you—I’d drop them at your feet, you gorgeous fucking bastard; don’t you_ know _?_

“Y-yeah,” Ed said.  “Yeah, I—”

Roy’s tongue made another appearance, tip tracing slowly over Ed’s knuckles.

“Lovely,” he breathed, with a dangerous hint of a narrow fucking grin.

Ed dragged in a shuddering breath and tried to focus through the whirling maelstrom of arousal in his brain.

“Fuck,” his voice said, sounding faintly surprised.  He tilted himself towards the nightstand, knowing Roy’s firm hand on his thigh would keep him from falling, and rummaged through the drawer until his fingers found the lube.

And there it was, as he shifted back, centering his body over Roy’s—their dicks brushed, and Roy’s hips hitched up, and lightning spiraled up his spine.  It was just so good with Roy; it was just so fucking _good_ —

Roy still had his right hand captured; one long, painstakingly thorough kiss to the center of his palm later, it’d been released, and Roy’s palms were tracking up his sides, fingers slowing their ascent to count his ribs out one by one.

Ed rolled his hips, and the laugh that jittered out of him at the way Roy groaned made both of them grin, and it just—

He’d been willing to give this up.

Thank Christ, thank fucking _anybody_ —thank the whole fucking universe he didn’t have to.

His balance was fucked, but Roy was holding onto him, hands still skimming back and forth across his skin; he had to plant one hand on the bed and shift his legs around to manhandle his boxers off of them; naturally they got fucking stuck on his dick, and the scrape of fabric wrung another little gasp-noise out of him.  Finally he wrangled them free and tossed them off somewhere in the tangle of the sheets, which made Roy’s smirk a whole lot wider and a whole lot _worse_ ; that alone set the heat in Ed’s guts to simmering brand-fucking-new.

He had to swallow a couple times to reorient himself—to try to clear his head, which was probably a lost cause, but he didn’t want to fucking hurt himself at a time like this, and everything was just so hazy when he got this damn turned-on.  It was like the whole world was moving through warm syrup, or… things.  It was like things.

It was like practically going blind from the sheer swell of feeling.

It was like being on fire underneath the skin.

One of Roy’s hands wound itself up in his dangling hair again; the other started massaging gently at his hip, drawing him forward to settle Ed’s center of gravity just over Roy’s waist.

His right hand was already pretty damp from its recent—and amazing—fucking adventures in Roy’s mouth, so he dumped some of the lube on it and rubbed his fingertips together to try to distribute it around, and then—

Roy’s eyes watching him were so fucking hungry he almost fucking came right there.

Barely still counted, though—and barely was how he made it to the part with the reaching around behind himself and tracing one slick fingertip in slow circles around his asshole, and _everything in him_ fucking throbbed.  The beat of it was—urgent, too-hot, _needy_ ; it was a fucking animal thing—

He didn’t want to wait.

But he knew Roy wouldn’t let him rush it if there was any risk he’d regret it later, because Roy was like that, the bastard, and—

And besides, there was something to be said for closely monitoring the way Roy’s bottom lip trembled when Ed arched his spine and let his head fall back as he started to finger himself.

It was still always kind of a shock at first—the sheer fucking bizarreness; the combination of sensations—but he didn’t want to _wait_ , and the slight sting-edged hint-of-a-burn of it sent tiny ripples running up and down his nerves, because his brain recognized what they meant.  His brain knew that particular mix of stimuli indicated that Ed was about to get fucked.

He had to play this game right, though—had to balance the fucking _comeonplease_ haste cycling heedlessly in his head with the concrete awareness that if he moved too fast, Roy would stop him out of concern that he’d do some damage.  Bastard didn’t understand that sometimes damage was part of the point—and Ed couldn’t have that argument right now.  Literally, that was, let alone psychologically; he wasn’t sure that he could _speak_.

He pressed his first finger up into himself slow but un-fucking-relenting—steadily, listening to the cadence of his own panting, keeping his eyes on the rapture unfurling on Roy’s face like this was the kindest gift from the universe that he’d ever received.  First knuckle was easy; second made him grit his teeth—dumbass; he had to _breathe_ ; he had to force his stupid animal brain and every single muscle to relax.

Roy made a low noise in the back of his throat—a deep noise; a rough noise; a fucking growl with an edge of unashamed possessiveness, and his tongue darted out to wet the pad of one thumb.  That hand drifted up Ed’s chest to graze damply across his nipple, then tweak it almost too hard; and the other arm wrapped around him, and the fingertips dug into the meat of his ass—

God, he melted like fucking butter under the heat of that—

He didn’t fucking care anymore, either; serendipitously, his body was in agreement, and it quaked and quavered and parted like the Red fucking _Sea_ —two fingers; he twisted his wrist once just to be sure he wasn’t forcing anything; _God_ that felt good—

But the best thing about it was watching Roy watch him take it.

Roy Mustang—the epitome of pure fucking dignity; the dictionary goddamn definition of _handsome_ ; possibly the world’s single most eligible bachelor who wasn’t heir to a fortune and/or a monarchy—was flushing from the base of his neck all the way to the tips of his ears.

The hand clasping his ass gripped harder—enough that it almost started to hurt, except that the pain transformed into something else entirely before it could register; Ed’s nerves lapped it up as delicious fucking ecstasy instead.  The thunder of his own pulse sweetened it; white-blind waves kept curling in him, seething up around his insides, but he couldn’t let them crash; not yet—

He didn’t even hear the sound he made when he pushed his third finger in underneath himself, but he felt it leave him on a harsh out-breath, and Roy’s whole body tightened, and his eyes went _huge_ —

There wasn’t any other power in the world like this.

“Shit,” Ed forced out, following it with a breathless little laugh, because he sounded stupid, but he knew for once that it didn’t matter in the least.  “M-maybe I should do this more often, what d’you think?”

“I think you should do it every fucking day,” Roy said, voice low and hoarse and fucking beautiful.  “But I’ll confess a little bias on that count.”

Ed could feel that the grin on his face wasn’t the one from his regular repertoire—it was sharper and slyer and, very possibly, _hot_.

“Takin’ you off the jury, Mustang,” he said.  He leaned in—way in, until he could breathe the next bit into Roy’s collarbones and up along his throat.   “But we can meet up in a private room if you wanna talk about the case.”

Funny how finger-fucking himself was giving him all _kinds_ of inspiration.

Roy was clearly pretty affected by it too, based on the rather incontrovertible evidence pressing progressively harder against Ed’s inner thigh as their bodies shifted closer by the fucking second.

“I would love to,” Roy said, clutching at Ed’s ass with the left hand and his hair with the right, tugging on the latter and then holding Ed’s head still while he dragged his teeth up Ed’s neck.  “I have several opinions I’d like to share.”

Fuck this shit; Ed was ready to _go_.  He shoved his fingers up and turned them a little and then drew them out, trying not to let the searing, stuttering progress of his own breath distract him; he braced himself on Roy’s shoulder with one hand and grabbed for Roy’s dick with the other, lined it up, lowered himself, caught his lip between his teeth and held it while he sank the fuck down—

The moment when it felt like too fucking much was the one he lived for—that first instant where it was more than he could fucking stand for one heart-stopping second; and he was fucking _positive_ that he was going to break—

And then the breath choked out of him and shimmered back in, and Roy’s skin against his was so fucking warm; and the wet slide of sweat and lube between them made Ed’s mouth water sympathetically; and Roy gasped so fucking softly, but his hands were frantic—

“God,” he groaned again, and Ed darted in to kiss up along the ridges of his throat before the last reverberations of the sound had faded out.

Roy’s fingertips danced up his back, sifted through his hair, flirted with the lines of the tattoo—those same fingers had started tracing it once, slow and intent and utterly specific, but when Ed had asked, Roy had dropped his hand like he’d been caught doing something wrong.

“That,” Roy murmured, and the fingertips grazed across Ed’s bottom lip where he was biting it, “may have been the sexiest thing I have _ever_ seen.”

Ed’s voice was a shadow of a thing, but shadows counted for more than he wanted most times.  “Bullshit.”

“Mmm,” Roy said, and the hands skated back down Ed’s sides to settle on his hipbones again.  “Not in the least.”

And a part of Ed wondered—

What if Roy really did mean it?

What if every time he said some schmoopy-stupid thing, it was the _truth_?

What if all the declarations—every single compliment; every last brown-sugar morsel of overstated praise—

What if he meant all of it from the bottom of his stupid fucking heart?

And if he did—

Well, shit.  If he did, he probably needed his eyes checked; and also Ed was the luckiest piece of feckless, fucked-up shit that the world had ever tried and failed to scrape off of the bottom of its shoe.

He was also about to fuck Roy Mustang’s brains out, which was easier than figuring out how to say _Thank you for being dumb enough to want me; I’m really grateful that your standards are so fucked_.

Burying both hands in Roy’s hair and kissing him—hard, and heavy on the tongue—seemed like a good segue either way.

When they came up for air, Ed started rocking his hips back and forth real fucking slow—and then drew himself up on his knees until he’d almost separated their bodies, and then struck up a rhythm, up and down and up and holy fucking _hell_ ; he’d volunteer to die a thousand times for another moment of the way Roy’s face had contorted with fucking rapture; he _would_.

And one of Roy’s hands was still tangled in his hair, and the other wrapped around his dick where it was pressed in between them, and the forest fire raging in his guts had decimated him to the ends of his fucking fingertips; he buried his face in Roy’s neck and mouthed at the sheen of sweat.

Roy’s hips kept rising up to meet him—serenaded every time by a faint huff of hot breath; Roy’s arm curled around the back of his neck, and they both scrabbled to realign themselves so that their mouths could collide—

Teeth and lips and the wet cadence of ever-faster panting in between them; Ed couldn’t tell whose shuddering sigh was whose—

But he knew whose fucking whimper it was when Roy’s dick, so-good so-big so- _full_ inside him, struck the fucking sweet spot and hit the endorphin jackpot, and _everything_ in Ed’s body went weak.

“Fuck,” he heard himself force out.  One more like that and he was fucking done for; that was a fact.  “Roy—”

“I’ve got you,” Roy said, and the smooth fingers tunneled around his dick stroked once, twice—

And Ed levered himself up and flung himself down hard—

And the starbursts on his eyelids made the birth of the universe look small.

He’d tensed all he could to maximize the impact, and when it slammed into him, he just—let go—just—

Roy’s hands fluttered in the sparking ether, fingertips flickering across his skin; the moan from deep in Roy’s chest rumbled right through Ed’s, ricocheting around his ribcage and slingshotting down his spine so that his hips jerked down with it, and instinctively he brought in his thighs—

Roy’s voice shook out of him so low and hoarse and ragged that everything in him squeezed: “ _Ed_ —”

And that was—

 _That_.  A foaming wash of fucking serotonin and fuck knew what else; warm, slick cum all over both of them—Ed had left a frankly pretty impressive fucking quantity across Roy’s stomach, and the returned favor had just started seeping out around Roy’s softening cock and dripping down his legs.

Holy hell.

Holy _hell_.

All he wanted to do was collapse into a boneless fucking sprawl and never move again for the rest of his fucking life—except maybe for coffee; he wasn’t a total idiot—but when you were the one on top of the tangle, you had certain responsibilities to fulfill, or… something.  Whatever.

So he reached one extremely heavy arm over and eviscerated the Kleenex box, pulling out half of its contents in order to start mopping up.

“God,” Roy said, kissing at his cheek and jaw when he moved back into range, then snatching a few of the tissues from him to assist.  “You… _God_.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” Ed said.  The trash can was about a billion miles away, and he was _not_ getting out of this sex-sleep-nest yet, so he just tossed the used Kleenex over the side of the bed.

“Speechlessness from me,” Roy said, “invariably is.”

At last, Ed gave in to the extremely insistent urge to collapse on top of Roy with one arm stretched out across the bastard’s chest.  Turned out exertion without any carby breakfast calories was way more taxing more than he’d bargained for.

“I better remember that,” he said into Roy’s surprisingly comfortable collarbone.  “Better write it down, since it’ll prob’ly be another year before it happens aga—”

“Oh, my God,” Roy said, displacing Ed’s more-or-less limp body as he tried to sit up.  “I bruised your ass.  I’m so sorry; I didn’t realize—”

Ed tried to twist around enough to look over his own shoulder.  “Huh?”  It did look like maybe there were some faint marks on his ass cheek where Roy had been gripping him like he was the last lifeline to the ship in a storm.  “Oh.  S’okay.”

“No, it’s not,” Roy said, brushing at the affected area with his hand like he could clear the color away—which was sort of hilarious, for starters; and which added an utterly exquisite fucking tingle on top of the pleasant ocean of the afterglow.  “That’s like leaving fingerprints on the Mona Lisa.”

Ed couldn’t help starting to laugh at that one.  “Roy, it’s an _ass_.  It’s not Renaissance art.”

“You’re right,” Roy said, bending enough to brush a kiss across the little flushed part.  “I’ve studied David’s ass extensively, and it’s not nearly as impressive as yours.  Perhaps Michaelangelo didn’t think people would believe him if he tried to encapsulate the sheer aesthetic power of an ass as nice as yours, so—”

“Shut _up_ ,” Ed said, rolling over so Roy couldn’t try to sing any more paeans to his upper thigh muscles.

“Oh, hell,” Roy said, wriggling in next to him but finally fucking settling down, at least.  “That reminds me that I promised Elicia I’d take her to the photography exhibition that just opened at the gallery.  Which would be lovely, don’t get me wrong, but I’d much rather lie here and fawn over you all day.”

“Don’t you dare fucking cancel on her,” Ed said, rolling back over and shoving ineffectually at Roy’s… something.  He couldn’t really tell what it was; he had his face pretty deep in the pillow again.  “She fucking treasures putting up with you, and you know it.”

Roy laughed softly, and several kisses landed in various parts of Ed’s hair.  “I know.  And I wouldn’t—I won’t.”  It was definitely time to get up; Roy had started _nuzzling_.  Ed was going to have to kick his ass soon.  In just another minute.  Maybe a minute and a half.  “You could come with us, so that I don’t have to let you out of my sight.”

“Nah,” Ed said.  “That’s her time.  And I’ve got shit I gotta do in the lab anyway.  Why don’t you just pick me up when you guys are done, and we can go to the store and then make dinner all together or some shit?”

This kiss was much more specifically aimed for his ear.  “That is a wonderful idea,” Roy said.

Ed managed to move enough to eye him.  “You sure you’re gonna let me out of the car, at the rate you’re goin’?”

“Nope,” Roy said cheerfully.  “You’ll just have to risk it and find out.”

“Eugh,” Ed said.

Roy recommenced the fucking nuzzling.  “May I make you coffee?”

“Fuck,” Ed said, which was an iota or two better than what he would’ve said if his mouth had caught up with the rest of him—which was _Goddamnit, Roy Mustang, I just love you so, so fucking much that there aren’t any words fucking big enough_.  “Please.”

That was a start.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First: You guys… are beyond description. I have the most amazing readers on the entire planet – you guys are funny and sweet and insightful and just so _generous_ , with your time and your words alike, and I cannot begin to thank you enough. I always mean to answer comments, because every single one of them matters to me – I really do live in hope that one of these days I'll have the energy to start doing that again, but for now I save my energy reserves for bringing out new stuff. I hope that's okay. ♥ Thank you guys so much for being here, for _always_ being here – everyone who comments; everyone who kudos's; everyone who visits and reads and participates in this thing. You guys are the reason for it. You guys are what make it important and meaningful and fun. ♥
> 
> Second: I am afraid I am indeed going to put the brakes on this bad boy again for a little while until Part VI is in slightly better shape, and Part VII is not a terrible mess. X'D But it's only a hiatus! Loud and Clear will be back, and we'll finish up all of the rest of this shit. And I have a TON of other content in the meantime, so keep an eye on your Tumblr feeds and/or inboxes. :'|
> 
> Third: I'll be at Crunchyroll Expo next weekend! I'll be Ed one of the days and Yurio from Yuri on Ice the other – haven't nailed down which day is which yet, so keep an eye on my [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/cicinettle/) for updates if you want to find out!
> 
> Fourth: [Roy/Ed Week](http://royedweek.tumblr.com) starts tomorrow! Holy shit. Come party and/or come appreciate a flood of OTP content from tons of talented people!
> 
>  
> 
> **RECAP:** Present-day!Ed is still in Edinburgh, about to start his last day of science-y lectures, having just talked some of the Roy situation out with Gracia. Past-tense!Ed and Roy finally kissed and made up, so things are sort of getting back to normal… OR ARE THEY??
> 
>  

The first mangled thought in his tortured head on Monday morning is that he should have smuggled some NyQuil onto the plane on the trip over.  Or maybe bought some of whatever the British equivalent is—probably it’d have a couple extra Us in the name, and maybe an S where he’d expect a Z, and…

And the point is, NyQuil is fucking magical, because it’s totally fucking legal, knocks you out without completely ruining you for the next day or two, and has just enough of an alcohol kick that you feel like you’re getting away with something when you hold your nose and choke down the overpowering gooey cherry flavor of your allocated dose.

Well—the real point is that he slept like shit, no goddamn surprise, and that some NyQuil could have solved that problem if he’d had any.  But half the shops that don’t cater directlyto tourists around here are closed on Sundays, and given how his luck’s been going lately, he hadn’t really wanted to tempt fate by wandering around Edinburgh at nine o’clock looking for a lit convenience store.

Fortunately-or-something, that’s what mainlining tea is for—that, and a DIY kidney cleanse, probably.  Blearily, he logs onto his laptop with the hand not burdened by the hilariously tiny mug provided by his good friends at Travelodge and starts poking around to see if anything blew up across the pond while he was sorta-sleeping.

Andy friended him on Facebook.  That’s cool.  He clicks over to accept the request, and then he glances at their main page just for funsies or whatever.

The first post on Andy’s timeline is a slightly blurry cell phone picture of… him.  Him at the podium the other day in full-on seminar mode, grinning as he gestured towards the screen.  Andy’s caption is _Bad photo cus my hands were shaking a bit - you don’t meet your bloody hero every single day!!!!_

Twenty people have already liked it, and one commented _holy hell is that who I think it is?_

It’s not the fame that matters to Ed.  It’s _mattering_ that matters.  It’s showing people, one damn lecture at a time, that with enough pigheadedness and a dash of circumstance, you can bring the status quo to its fucking knees.

He wants to say something pithy, but on a couple hours’ sleep and his first cup of tea, he’s positive that any attempts would end in public embarrassment and tears, so instead he just likes it and navigates back to his feed.

Winry posted a picture of a grandfather clock she’s rebuilding the insides of, complete with Al hovering in the background with what looks like a tray with coffee cups and maybe some pancakes.  That should probably be making Ed hungry, but it’s… not.

Maybe he finally really broke something inside somewhere, and his feelings, newly untethered, are all just drifting out of reach.

That might be nice, actually.  If they all just sort of… fade.  If the sea washes in and drowns out the harsh sounds, and the spiking heartbeat of the hurt settles to a gentle sort of pulse that barely registers through all the water.  If he just…

Christ, sleeplessness isn’t a good look on him.  Makes him weird.  Weird _er_ , arguably.

He closes the laptop lid and picks up his phone.  Once he’s on the Travelodge’s admittedly slightly shaky wifi, so that he’ll be sending messages on that instead of on the gold-plated, platinum-lined wiring systems of the international roaming service, he taps over to his text log with Roy and starts typing.

_Let me know what your schedule looks like today -- I figure you probably have doctor’s orders not to go into court but I don’t figure that will necessarily stop you.  I should be able to get on skype any time after about 10 am your time (Monday that is).  Just let me know._

It’s half an hour past midnight where Roy is.  He better be asleep and resting his broken-ass head, the bastard.

Didn’t Riza say she had to wake him up periodically to make sure he didn’t have a concussion?  How long does that go on?  Pertinently, has Roy thanked her lately for being a saint?

Whatever the case, Ed can’t afford to sit here staring at his phone and willing a reply bubble to appear.  He just _can’t_.  He learned that lesson a long damn time ago—if you let your universe revolve around a solitary light source without any independent motion, all your planets are going to be singed on one side and frozen on the other.

…yeah, he really needs some fucking sleep.

Desperation’s going to land him at a Starbucks trying to chug some burnt-bean-water, isn’t it?

Fuck.

  


* * *

  


Roy dropped Ed off on the nearest accessible street to his lab building—which still left him with a bit of a trek, part of it uphill; but cut a full half-mile off of the walk from the parking garage, so he wasn’t about to start complaining.

The hill, as it turned out, was a _bitch_ —embarrassingly e-fucking-nough, his ass was sore, and everything kept pulling the wrong way, and it hurt enough that he caught himself gritting his teeth more than once over the course of what couldn’t have been more than a five-hundred-foot ascent.  It wasn’t even _steep_.  He was getting fucking soft in his old age.

Eventually he survived the perilous freaking journey, but he couldn’t muster a sigh of relief as he badged into the building and started down the eerily empty halls.  There were other people around—there always were; research snoozed, but it never really slept, and lab hours were the most inconsistent shit imaginable as a result of the experiments’ weird-ass REM patterns and frequently non-negotiable demands—but he couldn’t see or hear any of them, so did it really matter?  Paola was due back Wednesday, and she’d sent him a bunch of work she’d done so he could leverage it with his, which was great, but—

But he was alone here.  And he didn’t know what the fuck he might find when he unlocked the door to a space that was supposed to be his sanctuary.

Nothing for it except to drag in a deep breath and find out.

He put his key in the lock, turned it, and opened the door.

The floor directly in front of him was mercifully empty.

To get any further than that, somebody would’ve had to talk the janitors into letting them in—which Ed wouldn’t exactly put past a certain diabolically manipulative motherfucker, but it seemed like too much work to suit that asshole’s style.  Kimblee was into maximum agony for minimum effort, after all.

Right?

Fuck.

Ed closed the door behind him, which might’ve been a bad idea, since this was a pretty well-acknowledged part of the process of becoming a recluse.  On the off-chance that some diligent postdoc wandered down the hallway to go to the bathroom or something, though, it’d probably give him a fucking heart attack, so it sounded better to seal himself in the room with the humming machines and the hollowness.

Right?

_Fuck_.

Data, then.  Data was good.  Data was safe.

Paola had sent him some really good shit—which made him feel kind of guilty, on the one hand, because she shouldn’t’ve been worrying about work at a time like that; but was sort of a relief, on the other, because she must not have felt _too_ shitty, or she would’ve begged off.  And, of course, Ed himself took solace in science often enough that it was probably a huge psychological red flag, so maybe she did the same.

He had to start looking on that fabled fucking bright side Al was always talking about.  Maybe it _was_ good.  Maybe it was good for both of them.

He turned the ringer on his cell all the way up and made sure the text sounds were on, just in case he went into a science trance and didn’t notice Roy updating him on the progress of Elicia’s artistic talents and/or sending selfies and shit.  Even at the worst of times, Ed supported Elicia about a thousand percent in whatever the hell her latest whim inspired her to do, but it was more than just that.  Things were still… delicate.  Maybe.  Roy wasn’t exhibiting any outward signs of awkwardness, but Roy and awkwardness had a sort of oil-and-watery relationship to start with, on top of which Roy was the _master_ of hiding shit he didn’t want showing on his face—so that didn’t tell Ed much.   _He_ felt awkward.  He felt like he had shit to make up for—shit to prove.  Even aside from the basic problem of his poisonous inadequacy etcetera and so on, now there was the fact that he’d semi-deliberately fucking hurt Roy and then clumsily tried to mend the break instead of cleaving it clean.  So that was another shitty thing he had to atone for, in some way.  No matter what Roy said, it counted; those things mattered, in the sum of who you were and how you affected people—in the measure of your li—

The lab landline rang.

The noise was so fucking loud and trilly and unfamiliar that Ed actually fell off of his chair, banging his elbow on the benchtop on his way down—which yanked a yelp out of him, which echoed, which unsettled him even more—

The floor seemed like a really nice fucking place to chill right now—he could just stay here and wait out the rings, right?  Just—not answer.  Not deal with it.  Who the fuck knew who it was, anyway?  And his whole arm was angry pins-and-needles numb, and…

Who even had this number?

It had to be online—even if he hadn’t put it up, they had half a dozen directories.  It was public knowledge: easily accessible, tied to his stupid fucking name.

He had to know.

He had to _know_ if it was—

He flailed one hand up and gripped the benchtop and dragged himself upright, set his jaw and his shoulders and the last of his resolve, and took the three strides over to the stupid fucking phone.

His heart-rate had increased so fucking fast that his head felt light; the damned fucking stupid piece of shit excuse for an organ responsible was in his throat again, strangling him, pounding hard—

The caller ID said _Izumi Curtis_.

He dropped into the chair right next to it and picked up the receiver, holding his breath while he lifted it so that he could speak on an exhale instead of in choppy little gasps.

“Hey,” he said.

Totally natural.  Totally not-crazy—normal and nice.  Civil.  Some shit.

He didn’t have fucking anxiety.  He _didn’t_.  He was fine.  He was going to be fine.

“Hey yourself,” Izumi said.  She didn’t sound concerned; with any luck, she hadn’t caught the scent of his slowly-dissipating abject panic.  “I was hoping you wouldn’t pick up because you were out enjoying your life with your, and I quote, ‘Egregiously attractive boyfriend’.”

“Was that Valerie?” Ed asked.

“Who else?” Izumi asked.  “Can I get you a coffee?”

Ed glanced towards the clock, then looked back at the phone—which also had a clock, which he hadn’t noticed, because he was a moron.  “Jesus, when did it get to be two?  Yeah, sure, um—you wanna meet in the middle somewhere?”

“Sometime shortly after one fifty-nine, I imagine,” Izumi said, but he could hear her smiling slightly to take the dry edge off of it.  “Quarto in ten?”

Ed tried to calculate based on the distance versus his estimated sore-ass-impeded velocity.  Quarto was one of those little campus cafés where you could use your student meal points, if you had such things, and it was tacked onto the side of the theater building.  No one had ever explained to Ed why the theater department nudged up against the edges of the science region so much; maybe it was to imply that they were all drama queens.  Which was, for the record, fair.  “I think I can do that, yeah.”

“C’mon, Elric,” Izumi said.  “You ‘think’, or you _will_?”

Ed grimaced.  “Have I mentioned that I miss working with you already?”

“You’re so sweet,” Izumi said.  “See you soon.”

  


* * *

  


He threw a notepad and a couple pens into his bag—with his laptop, of course, because he was never going anywhere without his precious baby ever again, or leaving it anywhere alone; it _needed_ him—and slung it over his left shoulder on his way out the door.  He locked up behind himself.  It wasn’t like anybody was going to need to get in, after freakin’ all.

At the very least, the walk to Quatro was all on flat ground, and it wound through a dense little copse of ash trees that he’d always liked—there were benches and shit sort of scattered around off of the sides of the path, and it was so badly paved that people on bikes mostly avoided it, which was about the best-possible-case scenario as far as walking routes were concerned.  Much less likely to get you turned into roadkill all around.

The leaves hadn’t really started falling yet, because September was a douchebag, and it was still warm bordering on muggy-gross, and Ed was wrapped up in his myriad dumbass thoughts—so it took him a little while to notice what sounded like footsteps behind him.

He was trying to talk himself down almost _before_ his blood ran fucking cold—this was a populous area of campus.  It was a Saturday relatively close to lunchtime, and half of the regular food outlets were closed on weekends, which forced students to go further afield in search of study snacks and shit.  Hell, it was, by most sun-worshipping weirdo-normal people’s standards, a “nice day”.  There were a thousand reasons to be out here, behind him, walking at a similar pace to his, that didn’t involve following him deliberately with the intention of tracking him down.

He couldn’t just—spin around and fucking look.  If it was some random student heading to the gym, they’d _remember_ the fucking weirdo guy with the long blond ponytail who was giving people the crazy eyes, and if someone mentioned that he was a professor, the rumor mill would grind out so much shit—

Besides which, it’d be giving in—wouldn’t it?  Succumbing to the paranoia meant letting Kimblee win.  That was what that fucker _wanted_ , in the end—to fuck Ed’s whole life over in that subtle, insidious, unprovable way; to tear him down again and force him to rebuild himself on a cracked fucking foundation.  For _fun_.

He also had to resist the urge to square his shoulders; if it really was somebody tailing him, they’d notice, and then they’d know, and…

Maybe if he faked like he needed to go into the next building—they were coming up on the engineering quad; he could jog up the stairs and then stop by the doors and pretend to be checking for a meeting location on his phone, and that’d give him a chance to look over his shoulder and—

Had they stopped?

He’d just passed a fork in the pathway; maybe they’d turned off.

It was nothing.  Of course it was nothing.  Jesus fucking _Christ_.

He listened hard again, but there didn’t seem to be anybody still behind him.  He _wasn’t_ going to turn around.  He ran his hand through his bangs and let a breath out really fucking slow.

Shit.  He was fine.  He was always fine.  He didn’t have a choice.

  


* * *

  


“Hello, stranger,” Izumi said, getting up from the table she’d claimed just inside the window when he stepped through the café door.  “Black coffee, but I forget how many sugars, so I left you a pile.”  She hugged him tight and then fixed her hand on his right shoulder and pointed to the bandage on his face.  “What happened?”

“Fender bender,” he said.  The more he spoke the words to people, the truer they sounded.  Language was funny that way.  “It’s nothing.  Stitches come out this week.  You didn’t have to buy me freakin’ coffee.”

“Nope,” Izumi said, practically pushing him into the chair.  “But I did anyway, so you better drink it.  How’ve you been?”  She eyed him as she sat.  “How have you _really_ been?”

Obvious hesitation would be the end of him, so he filled the space with a shrug.  “Lot of…” He waved towards his forehead.  “Personal shit, but—other than that, okay.”

“Bullshit,” Izumi said—so crisply that he almost jumped.  “I’m not old enough to have forgotten how it is when you’re starting out, Ed.”

He _might’ve_ wilted fast enough to make a thirsty plant proud, but nobody could prove it.  “I—all right, yeah, I mean—it’s a little—overwhelming.”

Izumi sipped delicately at her tea.  “That’s more like it.”  She looked at him over the rim, and the cup covered her mouth, but he could see that she was smiling.  “You know we miss the hell out of you, right?”

He was definitely not blushing a little bit.  “What?  Why?  I figured you couldn’t wait to get me out of there.  Although I think there’s a permanent imprint of my ass on that chair, so you probably had to throw it out.”

“I was surprised we didn’t have to pry you off that thing with a crowbar,” Izumi said.  “I almost cried when I had to put your picture up on the alumni wall.”

Ed stopped with his hand poised to dump a sugar packet in his coffee cup.  “You did _not_.”

“I did,” Izumi said.  “Ask Valerie.  Actually, don’t; I think she’ll just interrogate you about your man.”

Fuck.  Absolutely one-hundred-fucking-percent blushing now.  He ducked his head; maybe she wouldn’t notice.  “Valerie needs to get a life.”

“Valerie needs to get laid,” Izumi said, perfectly calmly.  It kind of went without saying that Ed missed the hell out of _her_.  “Sometimes I feel like I should add a mandatory hour at the start of lab meeting that has to be spent browsing Match.com.”

“Better than Tinder,” Ed said.

“She’s on that one, too,” Izumi said.  She raised an eyebrow.  “Speaking of which, in a roundabout sort of way—how are things with yours?”

Ed’s brain stumbled.  “I don’t have Tinder.  It’s a crock of shit.”

Izumi raised the other eyebrow, but she was smiling again.  “Your man.”

“Oh,” Ed said.  “Um—good.  Fine.”

Ed had heard it said that a single look from Izumi Curtis could send an undergrad who hadn’t done their homework into an instantaneous coma.

He’d always believed that one.

Especially when she was looking at him like _that_.

“Uh,” he said.  “Mostly good.  I mean, we had a…”  Fight?  Sort of.  Argument?  Kind of.  Breakup?  …ish.  “…thing.  Problem.  Problem-thing.”  He swallowed, fiddling with the torn edge of one of the sugar packets so that he wouldn’t have to look at her, since she was probably judging him hardcore.  “Disagreement, I guess.”

“Was it about money?” Izumi asked.

He couldn’t help glancing up at that, but she had a hell of a fucking poker face on all of a sudden.  “Huh?  No.”

She tilted her head just slightly.  “Was it about sex?”

Since he’d evidently entered a parallel universe, it didn’t really matter what he said from this point on.  “No, no, no—it—was—I mean—the thing is, like—”

He took a deep breath.  For years he’d felt strongly like Izumi’s expectations for him leveled out somewhere around the stratosphere—and when it came to science, that was a fucking breeze; but when it came to who he was as a human being, he always ended up floundering around helplessly trying to sound less-stupid than he knew he was.

But it came down to logic, in the end, like a lot of things did.

If she didn’t respect him, she wouldn’t have fought to help him get that PhD.

And if she didn’t genuinely care about him, she wouldn’t have offered him time out of her day and the price of a coffee out of her wallet.

So he breathed, and tried his damnedest to be worthy of that.

“It was about me,” he said.  “About me being a drain on him when that’s the last thing he freakin’ needs, I guess.”

Her features hadn’t shifted, but there was a chilly gleam in her eye that reminded him of…

Al, bizarrely.

“Did he say that?” she asked.

Why did everybody get that part backwards?

“No,” Ed said, and if it came out a little too fast, well—good.  Maybe that would convince her he meant it.  “He said… I mean, he said a lot of things, but the whole problem is that he didn’t say that.  He _wouldn’t_ say that.  Even if it was true.  Especially if it was.  Which I really, really think it is, and—”

From between his hands, there came a tiny little _tsch_ noise and then a brief little hiss of a crescendo.  He’d worried at the corner of one of the sugar packets so much with his fingertips that it had split open and spilled all over the tabletop.

“Shit,” he said.

“Leave it,” she said.  “And what?”

Deep breaths were apparently the name of the game yet again today.  Maybe he needed to stop waiting for a day when that wasn’t fucking true.

“When you met Sig,” he said, “how did you know you were anywhere near as good for him as he was for you?”

Silence settled in and reproduced and colonized the space between them for a long moment—long enough that Ed caught himself listening intently to the all-too-familiar clank and clatter of cups and utensils coming from the bar, and the muted tones of the conversation two tables over, just to make sure he hadn’t gone suddenly deaf.  That’d be just his fucking luck, after all, so—

“I didn’t,” Izumi said, about as softly as he’d ever heard her say anything.  “You can’t.  That’s the thing—people aren’t like science.  You can’t prove anything.  You can’t _know_ ; you can never _know_.  You have to take what they tell you for truth and mark that as data points.  You have to believe what they say, and you have to trust what you feel.  That’s all you get to go on.”

Ed tried to corral the spilt sugar into a little mountain with the palm of his hand—which was definitely not shaking again or anything, because that would be stupid.  “That’s really illogical.”

“Tell me about it,” Izumi said.  “People make quantum physics look like a walk in the park.”

That dragged a smile out of Ed against his will, and he chanced glancing up at her.  She didn’t look like she was judging him nearly as hard as he’d expected, so that was something, right?

She was smiling, but it had gone all… sad, somehow.

“Christ, Ed,” she said.  “You really don’t think you’re special, do you?”

That was a tough question, because it pitted his natural inclination towards contrariness against the concrete facts of his existence.

“I’m barely getting by,” he said.  “What’s so special about that?”  He hadn’t even meant to say that much, but he’d displaced a load-bearing beam with it, and he could feel the walls quaking—the whole fucking house was about to come down, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.  “I just—every single day is like a fucking mountain, and I’m tired, and I feel like all I do is fuck up and fall down everywhere I go, so—what’s the _point_ , right?”  He wrapped both hands around the coffee cup and tried to find some kind of little-detail beauty or some shit in the way it warmed his palms.  Wasn’t that supposed to be nice?  “Does it ever—does it ever get easier?”

“Easi _er_?” Izumi asked.  “Yes.  Easy?  Not in this universe.”  She leaned forward towards him, and her eyes were unbelievably intense and somehow sort of gentle at the same time.  “It’s like disease immunity.  Something comes at you once, your T-cells are all over it.  Next time, you have the antibodies, and your body already knows how to fight it.  But viruses evolve, right?  They mutate; they develop nine kinds of drug resistance; they learn and grow just like we do; they come back different and sometimes stronger.  Or there’s something new out there ready to knock you on your ass.  You change, and your problems change.  But—no.  It never gets easy.  You never get to quit rolling with the punches.”

Ed needed some of that coffee right about now.  He still had the presence of mind to blow on the surface before he sipped—and the presence of mind to remember that he’d ranted about that habit before, because how much of a real fucking difference could it make?  There wasn’t any consequential alteration in the fluid dynamics; and a person’s breath was likely to be warm enough that it wouldn’t affect _anything_ thermodynamically speaking, so…

“Ed,” Izumi said, and how was this the second time in two days that somebody had reached a hand across a coffee shop table to get his attention?  “You’re doing a _wonderful_ job.  I always assumed some part of you knows it, but—you don’t, do you?  You really think everyone else is better at this game than you are, and that somehow any shortcomings on your part are your own fault.”

This was why Ed didn’t need a psychiatrist or some medication or whatever shit—everybody already saw through him anyway.

“You’re amazing,” Izumi said.  “It’s not easy, and it never _feels_ easy, but you’re doing great.  You’ve done incredible things with your life, fighting tooth and nail and giving all of yourself to it.  I admire you.  I mean that.  I’ve mentored forty students since I started this thing, Ed—you think I say that to every one of them?  You think I’d say it if it wasn’t true?”

He wanted to believe her.  She wasn’t a bullshitter; she never had been.  She didn’t beat around the bush, and she didn’t sugarcoat shit, and that intimidated the hell out of a lot of people—it had intimidated him, at first, but in the end it was part of why they’d always gotten along so well.

He wanted to believe her.

But it rolled off.

“Thanks,” he said, because that was the polite response.

She was damn smart, which was also part of why they got along.  “One of these days,” she said, “someone’s going to get through your skull, Elric.”

“Maybe,” he said.  “With a scalpel.  Or a drill.”  He pointed to he gauze.  “My steering wheel tried, but…”

She was shaking her head as she sat back.  “Listen—bottom line is, as far as the relationship thing goes?  If you’re happier together than apart, stay together.  If you’re not, then don’t.”

He looked at her.

She looked back.

“Yes, I just criminally oversimplified your life,” she said.  “Drink your coffee.”

He was so accustomed to following her directions that he sipped without even questioning it.

“So,” he said, slightly tentatively it had to be admitted.  “How are things in your neck of the woods?”

“More or less the same,” she said.  “We do have a new autoclave slave—pardon me, undergraduate.  She’s Latvian and incredibly polite.  It’s really a pity you’re not around to blow her mind with unapologetic profanity.”

“Thanks,” Ed said.  “I think.”

Izumi’s smile was just a tiny bit too satisfied for a second, but then she started telling him all about the project she had the undergrad on, and all of the cool things this kid would get to learn, and that was—good.  That was _good_.  It was good to think about; it was good to remember how bright and exciting and fascinatingly complex and delightfully, terrifyingly open-ended research was when you were first starting out.  How huge the world of science could be.  How much you could do with just your brain… and a couple of pieces of multiple-thousand-dollar equipment bolted down to a lab bench.

“I hope you know,” Izumi was saying, “that if you ever need to borrow the ultracentrifuge, all you have to do is ask.  You could probably just show up, but if you get in the way of Valerie’s mad dash for the doctorate, I can’t guarantee you’ll survi—”

A part of him registered the bell at the door jingling when someone opened it.  A much larger part registered a low, smooth, quasi-musical voice saying “Good afternoon.”

And _that_ part made him tense up and spin around so fast his shoulder tweaked, and the end of his ponytail whipped around and slapped the side of his own fucking face—

It was—

Some guy.

It was just some guy he’d never seen before—not even fucking _close_ to Kimblee; this guy was black, for starters, with a really striking, angular face and a big smile he was directing at some girl who was jumping up from her table to greet him.

Not Kimblee.

Just some guy—some total stranger with a rich voice that sounded a little bit like the one he was expecting at every fucking turn.

The breath was darting in and out of him rough and fucking fast; he tried to slow it by force as he settled in his chair again.  Pity he wasn’t dumb enough to think Izumi wouldn’t have noticed that.  Pity nobody on the _planet_ could’ve failed to fucking notice, let alone a seriously intelligent, searingly insightful professor and scientist who had known him for years.

Sure enough, she was watching him intently, with that terrifyingly meaningful eyebrow raised.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

He swallowed, then swallowed again to make sure his voice wouldn’t shake.  “Not… especially.”

“When you do,” she said, “you’ve got my cell, okay?”

They were wrong—all of them.  He had never done a damn thing in his life to deserve any of the extraordinary people all around him.

“Okay,” he said.

It was a lot easier than saying _I could never bring myself to ask someone to help me carry this shit; how could I impose that on another human being?_   It was a lot easier than _Mayday’s for when you’re dying, not for when you’re desperate.  Desperation you have to do alone._

Maybe that was stupid.

Maybe Roy had a point, about there being something badly-fucking-wired in his brain; maybe—

But he was better than that.  He was _more_ than that.  He could beat it—he could kill it; drown it; crush it; _win_.  He just had to try a little harder.  That was all.  He just had to get a handle on himself and work at it a little more.  He was fine.  It was fine.  Everything was going to be fine.

“So,” Izumi said, apparently taking fucking pity on him and his pathetic, awkward, coffee-clutching, soul-searching silence.  “What are you working on today?”

  


* * *

  


Maybe the coffee hadn’t been the best idea—sure, she’d already bought it for him; but it also took him on a weird energy roller-coaster, which concluded with him tilting his lab chair back as far as it could go and spinning himself around slowly, kicking off of the leg of the bench every time he came around to bolster his momentum.

The lab ceiling, upon careful observation, was a little weird.  It was made up of all of these subtly mismatched tiles—like they’d run out of white ones and just sort of thrown in whatever they had left from other buildings or some shit.  On the one hand, that gave it character; on the other, it sort of made him worry about what else they’d half-assed when they built this lab.  What if one of the fucking CO2 lines had enough _character_ to spring a leak and gas them all the fuck to death, or—?

His phone bleeped deafeningly loudly, and he startled so hard he almost fell out of the chair for the second time in a single day.

With that potential crisis averted by sheer dumb luck, he fumbled to get the damn thing out of his pocket so that he could see the screen.

_Hi, you, <3_ Roy had written.  Bastard was probably going to abuse the hell out of the renewed opportunity to spam Ed with the little hearts.  _Ready for a culinary adventure, or should we go buy some sparkly things to give you a bit more time?_

_what kind of sparkly things are we talking about?_ he sent.  _that’s a pretty broad category.  could be anything.  is Gracia going to let you back in the house if you all try to bring sparkly obelisks and shit in with you?  haha no i’m ready whenever but take your time if you’ve got stuff you still wanna do, no prob_

He hadn’t diagrammed the ceiling tile pattern yet, after all.

_Be there in a thought,_ Roy wrote.   _Or about fifteen minutes, whichever’s faster.  I know you have very complex thoughts; I’m hedging my bets._

Ed typed out _you are infuckingcorrigible is what you are_ but then deleted it, because texting Roy _knowing_ thathe was driving at the time sounded pretty reckless, particularly in light of his own recent close encounter of the car accident kind.

He settled for walking his possibly-dumb, definitely-sore ass back down to the little turnout area where Roy had dropped him off.  The hill managed to be almost as much of a bitch on the way down, which was sort of impressive, actually; he felt like he should pen a sternly-worded, reluctantly-admiring letter to the university’s landscapers.

They’d ended up picking a spot near the front of one of the dorm buildings, so there was a bus stop bench just a little ways down the sidewalk—but, firstly, there was nothing more awkward than having to wave a bus past you with the specific sort of chagrin that made it painfully clear that you were just using their route as furniture; and second, he’d been sitting all damn day so far anyway.  He settled for leaning against the pole of the sign reading _Loading Zone_ , although based on the slightly uncertain look he garnered from a passing student just for that, apparently loitering with long hair was _frowned upon_ on this fucking campus.  Wasn’t that just the story of his fucking life?

Fortunately, one of the much better chapter headings turned up in the requisite obnoxiously sexy sports car about forty seconds later, so there wasn’t time to stew.

Elicia rolled her window down as Roy slowed the car.  She was wearing Roy’s sunglasses, which looked almost as good on her as they did on him—rather less dashing, to be fair, but every bit as fashionable and whatever shit.

“Get in, loser,” she said.  “We’re going grocery shopping.”

Ed was laughing as he opened the rear door and bundled himself and his bag into the back seat, but she turned around anyway, looking concerned.

“I don’t really think you’re a loser,” she said.  “It’s a ‘Mean Girls’ quote.”

“Don’t worry,” Ed said.  “Winry made us see it three times in the theater.”

Roy cleared his throat, craning his neck into the little space between the front seats.  “Hello, gorgeous.”

Ed’s cheeks might’ve been a touch more pinkish than was their wont as he leaned in for the kiss.  “Hey.”

A part of him—a dumb part, maybe, but a hyper-socialized, deeply-ingrained part that many years of hacking hadn’t cut out yet—was afraid that Elicia was going to make a face or a noise or something because they’d made her uncomfortable.  But if they’d been a dude and a chick, nobody would’ve cared, right?  A little greeting peck was fucking G-rated shit in any other circumstances, wasn’t it?

In any case—either because she was too well-raised or because the world was finally fucking changing—Elicia didn’t bat an eyelash.

“Hey, Ed,” she said as he sat back, and Roy fired up the engine.  “You’re a smarty-pants professor now, right?”

“Well,” Ed said, “I’m a professor, anyway.  Assistant professor.  But it counts.”

“I always figured science professors had to have glasses,” Elicia said.  “Like, that was a requirement for getting the job and stuff.  You gotta check a box on your résumé.”

Ed grinned instead of grimacing, though the latter was what he wanted to do, because even just the thought made him envision how he’d look.

He’d look like his fucking father.  Unmistakably.

“Guess I cheated, then,” he said.

“My mom says I probably have to get glasses,” Elicia said, sounding almost as put-out as he would have.  “She says I have my dad’s eyes.”

Life was full of weird parallels when you started to pay attention.

“I used to get that, too,” he said.

“You’d look great in glasses,” Roy told Elicia.  “Extremely sophisticated.  And you could emphasize your sarcasm whenever you wanted by looking over the top of them.”

“Plus if you didn’t like ’em,” Ed said, “you’re really responsible, so I bet you could convince your mom to let you get contacts if you took good care of them for a while.  And then you could get a couple different pairs of colored ones and change your eyes to match your outfits.”

Speaking of Elicia’s eyes, they’d just lit up.  Fucking bingo, as they said.

“Like in _The Wizard of Oz_ ,” Elicia said.  “Where she asks them to dye her eyes to match her dress.”

“Oh, dear,” Roy said.  “Princess, please don’t beg your mother for colored contact lenses.”

“I won’t tell her it was _your_ idea,” Elicia said.

“In that case,” Roy said, “go right ahead.”

“Thanks, Uncle Roy,” Elicia said brightly.

“I guess we should make something with carrots,” Roy said.  “Since we’re now on a mission to preserve your eyesight.  You’ll need it if you’re going to take up photography.  Or is the carrot thing a myth, Resident Scientist?”

“Can I put that on my business card?” Ed asked.  “And it’s sort of true.  Vitamin A and stuff.”

“How about carrot cake?” Elicia asked.

“I’m not sure that counts,” Roy said.  “In addition to which I’m fairly sure your mother would eviscerate me if we made carrot cake for dinner.”

Elicia lowered his sunglasses to give him a reprimanding look that she had definitely inherited from the woman in question.  “I meant for _after_ dinner, Uncle Roy.”

He grinned at her.  “Well, then—do you know how to make carrot cake?”

“I think there’s cream cheese in it,” Elicia said.

“If there isn’t,” Ed said, “we still end up with cream cheese, so I figure that’s a win.”

“I didn’t know cream cheese was such a draw for you,” Roy said.  “If I had, I would have repainted the walls with it a long time ago.”

“ _Eew_ ,” Elicia said, but she was laughing.  She pushed the sunglasses up all the way into her hair to emphasize the look she was giving Roy this time.  “It’d _mold_!”

“Don’t scientists like mold?” Roy asked.

“Just because I may or may not accidentally cultivate it in your shower,” Ed said, “which I’m not admitting to, mind you, ’cause I know how this lawyer stuff works… that doesn’t mean I _like_ it.”

“Mold is gross,” Elicia said.  “There’s lots of science that’s nice and clean and stuff.  Isn’t there?”

“Next time you come over,” Ed said, “we’re going to the planetarium.  And then we’re gonna learn about astrophotography.”

“And then you’re going to beg your mother for a telescope,” Roy said, “that matches your contact lenses.”

“It’s educational,” Ed said.

“It is,” Roy said.  “In economics.”

“ _I’ll_ buy her a telescope,” Ed said.  “For Christmas.”

“Really?” Elicia asked, sounding excited enough to be the future discoverer of at least three extrasolar planets.

There was just one problem, which was the one Roy had already pinpointed.

“Um,” Ed said, “yeah.  Just as soon as I… get tenure… and start making enough money for that kind of thing.”

“When’s that gonna be?” Elicia asked.

Ed tried to sink back into the seat leather far enough to disappear, but no luck.  “Probably, like… ten years or so.”

“If you still want one by your birthday,” Roy said before Elicia’s face could fall any further and ruin Ed’s life any more, “I’ll pitch in.”

Elicia lit up again instantly.  “You mean it?”  Her face then got caught in an interesting transitional state between delighted optimism and cynical uncertainty.  “You don’t mean it.  You’re just saying that.”

“I do mean it,” Roy said.  “You may have noticed that I happen to have a soft spot for science geeks.”

“You’re going to have a soft spot in your skull if you call me a geek again,” Ed said.  “I’m a _nerd_ , Mustang; get with the program.”

“Terribly sorry,” Roy said.

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Ed said.

Elicia was watching them with a huge smile, with the sunglasses tugged low enough now that Ed could see the little crinkles at the corners of her eyes.

“You two are really cute,” she said.

“Oh, shit,” Ed said, forgetting the _Don’t swear in front of Gracia’s kid_ rule.  “Roy, pull over; I think I’m gonna barf.”

“Suck it up, dear,” Roy said.  “You brought this one on yourself.”

Ed mimed collapsing dramatically across the back seat in despair, which made the seatbelt edge dig into his neck but also made Elicia laugh, so the pain was mostly worth it.

  


* * *

  


Elicia documented their entire culinary experience with her little handheld Canon camera, which apparently had been her joint present from Roy and her mom for her last birthday.  Ed didn’t know shit about photography from a practical perspective, but he did know that he’d seen an awful lot of pictures of food sitting in cookware on top of tables.  With fruit, painters and whoever had elevated that to the concept of a “still life”—as though there was any “life” in dead plant ovaries, but that was beside the point.

Elicia also seemed to be taking an awful lot of pictures of him and Roy elbowing each other and tugging on each other’s hair (the latter was pretty one-sided) and making faces at each other.  He was hoping the one of him histrionically menacing Roy with the chef’s cleaver had turned out well.  Maybe she’d email it to him, and he could make it his phone background.

They’d bailed on the carrot cake plan upon remembering that Gracia could bake circles around all of them without even trying, so it was sort of pointless to make something that Elicia would just have to bring home to the master in disgrace.  Roy had suggested steak with vegetables and mashed potatoes as an alternative, which—other than the fact that Ed had a moment in the grocery store where his eyes went a little hazy, and his hands twitched with the urge to tear Roy’s clothes off and jump him in the middle of the produce aisle—had turned out to be an excellent idea all around.

They delivered Elicia back to her house with a leftover steak wrapped up in foil for her mother and an SD card full of low-level blackmail material.  Hopefully Gracia would appreciate one or the other.

Roy didn’t even wait until they were across the threshold back home to sling his arm around Ed’s waist.

“Is your ass okay?” he asked.

Ed wrinkled his nose.  “My ass is fine,” he said.

Roy winked back.  “Well, I knew _that_.”

Ed rolled his eyes so hard he almost lost them inside his own skull.  “Save the buttering up for the potatoes.”

Roy’s hand swept up his back and then back down, lightly.  “Can I make you a hot chocolate?”

Ed blinked up at him.  “Hang on—are we still flirting?  Is that your way of offering to give me some sugar?”

Roy’s fingers trailed through his hair again.  “Well, sugar’s always on the menu, but I meant it.  I should be more specific: can I make you a Bailey’s hot chocolate?”

Ed nudged his shoulder in under Roy’s arm, just to give the man’s ribs a break from the elbow before it left a mark or something.  “What, liquoring me up, too?”

“Maybe a bit,” Roy said, running his knuckles along the curve underneath Ed’s shoulder-blade.  “You seem a little…”

“Anxious?” Ed asked, and it took about everything in him not to tense up enough to prove it.

“Piqued,” Roy said—voice low and completely calm, though the hand stroking at Ed’s hair told a slightly different story.  “Rattled.  Overstimulated.  Just a touch.”

Ed bumped his hip against Roy’s—maybe-possibly against Roy’s thigh, rather than the ideal intended target—to try to communicate that he wasn’t upset or whatever shit.  Another time he might’ve been, but he was tired, and… and, well, shit.  Roy was on his side.  Roy _wanted_ to be on his side.  That was the point, really, and he was trying to keep it in his crosshairs instead of letting all the ambient shit distract him.

“I’m okay,” he said.  “I mean it.  Just—I mean, maybe a little antsy, but—I had coffee with Izumi earlier, so it’s probably half the coffee and half her.”

They’d gravitated over towards the couch, which wasn’t exactly a surprise; Elicia was _awesome_ , but hanging out with kids was like wrestling a hurricane at the best of times.  Ed dropped onto the deliciously fucking familiar cushions ( _he’d almost given this up—_ ) and got settled; Roy perched next to him and splayed a hand on his knee.  Presumably he was trying to imply that he was still ready to dart into the kitchen and start pouring liqueur into cocoa at the slightest provocation.

“Is she delighted to see you establishing yourself, or regretting that you’re no longer expanding your ferocious intellect under her guidance?” Roy asked, because apparently people like Roy could talk with words like that in _real time_.

“Kind of both,” Ed said.  His eyes felt blurry again, so he rubbed at them, which made them feel like he’d rubbed them too hard.  “But it’s like… she was saying I’m doing really well, right?”

“You are,” Roy said.

Ed made a valiant attempt to stop using any of the muscles in his back and let the couch support him completely.  “I mean, logically—from a distance, in a big-picture kind of way—I know that.  I mean, I know I’m doing okay.  I did a lot of the shit that’s supposed to mean you’re successful, or a competent adult, or whatever the fuck it is.”

Roy smiled—gently, and his fingers curled until they were squeezing Ed’s knee.

“But?” he said softly.

“But day-to-day,” Ed said, “minute-to-minute, like—it just feels like everything is fucking _crumbling_.  Always.  All the time.  Like everything is constantly falling to fucking pieces, and there’re only so many things I can grab onto and hold to my chest and keep safe, and I’m always going to be missing something, and something’s always going to slip.”

Roy’s face was a fucking masterpiece, and no goddamn mistake.  It wasn’t just gorgeous—obviously it was gorgeous, but it was more than that: it was complicated.  It was nuanced and delicate and constantly in flux.

“Ed,” he said.

“Except enough about fucking me,” Ed said.

Roy’s mouth quirked.  “There’s no such thing as enough about fucking you.”

Ed reached up to push—less than halfheartedly; a quarter- or a third-heartedly, more like—at Roy’s shoulder.  “You know what I mean.  So tell me about your case.”

The two-second pause was just long enough for Roy to have analyzed everything that Ed wasn’t giving voice to—and to have decided that it wasn’t worth arguing over things that hadn’t ever quite been said.

“If you want to hear about that,” Roy said, “I’m going to have to make enough Bailey’s hot chocolate for the both of us.”

“Deal,” Ed said.

  


* * *

  


It was only when they were practically halfway into the mugs that Roy finally caved—looking intently at the far wall, he started, haltingly at first, to explain that the deeper he dug, the more the dirt on Bradley scared the hell out of him.  There were red flags tangled up in red tape everywhere; a thousand bad signs in increasingly bright colors—the outright accusations were only the surface of the damage; the implications swelled like an iceberg underneath.  No one went at a man with that much power head-on, which meant that the fact that people had attempted at _all_ —

And it was an impersonal crime they’d dragged the general to court for—petty fraud; tax evasion; bureaucratic crap.  Was it unethical to defend him on those grounds, against allegations of which he probably _was_ innocent, when the contours of bloody skeletons kept multiplying in his closet, and the shadows were only going to hide them for so long?

Roy was starting to think the guy had taken bald-faced bribes from arms dealers—and, if not _staged_ , shamelessly provoked conflicts with the local Afghanis in order to make the weapons look necessary.  People had died.  There was just enough evidence to suggest that he’d been responsible for half a dozen casualties of friendly fire for similar reasons; there were just enough clues to whisper that he’d smeared every soldier who tried to blow the whistle and sent them packing with a discharge or a surface wound or worse.

And that changed everything.  It changed Roy’s _memories_ , and he had to keep calling up all the sleeping demons to try to figure out what they would have looked like if he’d known then what he knew now.  Could he live with himself if he accepted payment from someone who could have unquantifiable gallons of blood splashed across his hands?

“I know,” Roy said, with a dry rasp of a noise too faint to qualify as a sardonic laugh, “that there is no ‘right’ thing to do—but what the hell is the least wrong?”

Ed swallowed hard.  Roy was leaning against him, head resting on top of his.  He fumbled in the space between them until he found Roy’s hand to grasp it.

“I dunno,” he said.  “I mean—you’re doing your job, right?  Your job right now’s just dealing with the charge he’s in court for, not any of the other stuff.”

“And we need the money,” Roy said.  “The firm, I mean.  I have a choice, obviously, but the other options are a bit bleak.  Is that selfish?”

Ed gripped Roy’s hand a little tighter.  “I don’t know.  I wish I did.  Well—this is sort of how the judicial process has to work, right?  It’s never gonna be cut and dry and black and white, but your place in that system is to present the evidence that pertains to the _specific_ question being tried.  Right?  So the rest of it—I mean, yeah, it matters, but—”

“It’s all right,” Roy said softly, nuzzling at Ed’s temple gently—so clearly he wasn’t feeling quite as bad as he could’ve, if his schmoop instincts were intact.  “Earlier, what you said to Elicia…”

“Al knows people in astronomy,” Ed said.  “And everybody loves Al, so I bet he could get me a pretty damn good used telescope for about a hundred bucks.”

“That’s wonderful,” Roy said, “but I meant what you said about your father’s eyes.”

Ed felt himself going iced-fish immediately—his hand probably transformed into a slab of defrosting salmon in Roy’s, and the rest of him was just _stuck_.  “Oh.”

Roy extracted his hand from Ed’s—the better to slip his arm around Ed’s shoulders instead.  “It’s just that you don’t talk about him very much.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  He wasn’t sure what the fuck else to say.  “I mean—I had this thing for a long time when I was a kid, where I honestly believed that if I just thought about him as little as possible, he’d _know_ somehow that he didn’t matter to me anymore, and that’d be the best possible revenge.”

He could feel Roy smiling against the side of his head, which should have been weird but wasn’t.  “My experience has always been that trying not to think about something or someone only makes it significantly worse.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Mine too.”  He reached up to tug on Roy’s collar.  “You’re not exactly a font of anecdotes about your own family.”

“I barely knew them,” Roy said.  “My Aunt Chris is much more interesting anyway.  One of these days when I’m feeling brave, I’ll have to take you by her place.  Well—when you’re feeling brave, too, since you may well be traumatized for life.”

“That kind of ‘interesting’, huh?” Ed asked.

“It’s hard to describe,” Roy said.

“Would she and Pinako get along?” Ed asked.

“Far too well,” Roy said.  “If the planet survived, there would probably be epic poems written afterwards.”

“That tells me pretty much everything I need to know,” Ed said.

Roy drew back, lifting the hand that wasn’t wrapped around Ed’s shoulders to push his hair back from his forehead—which seemed to be Roy’s single favorite completely pointless Sisyphean task.

“Thank you,” he said.

Ed made a face.  “For what?”

“Being you,” Roy said.  “Being you with me.”

Ed made an even better face.  “If you’re going to thank me for that, then I get to thank you for being smoking fucking hot and putting up with my shit and buying me food and letting me hang out with the cool people you know and still talking to me when I don’t take your advice sometimes even though I know it’s good a—”

Roy kissed him to shut him up, which was neither unexpected nor unpleasant.

  


* * *

  


A part of him didn’t want to go to sleep.

That part of him was right.

He dreamed he was back in Izumi’s lab, and the centrifuge he was using kept spitting his tubes back out at him like a fucking machine-gun, but he _had_ to get this damned experiment done, so he kept trying to dodge them and then chase them down and jam them back in and make them stay in the body of the machine so that he could slam the lid.

He’d almost gotten the fucking thing shut when he heard the voice behind him:

“This is very quaint.”

He tried to keep one arm slung across the centrifuge to hold it closed with his own weight even while he turned—but he didn’t have to look, because he _knew_ —

Kimblee smiled at him—no teeth, just pure fucking malice.

Valerie was hanging off of his arm, gazing up at him like he’d bestowed an indescribably precious gift upon her, and Ed just wanted to grab her hand, drag her away from him, shake her by the shoulders— _You’re so smart and such a good scientist; you don’t_ need _him; you don’t need_ anybody _; you’re good enough, you are_ —

“You can show me what you’re working on,” Kimblee said, and Valerie was all bubbly enthusiasm; she towed him over to her bench and started trying to explain the seriously cool sequencing experiment she’d come up with.

Kimblee just kept staring, unblinking, uninterrupted, at Ed half-sprawled on top of the centrifuge.  Ed felt a huge flush of fucking embarrassment creeping over him, swelling up from the pit of his stomach and trying to drown his brain—not just at the awkward position he was in; but at the fact that he was responsible, somehow, for bringing this fucking monster into Valerie’s life now, and the asshole wouldn’t even _look_ at her, no matter how misguidedly happy it would’ve made her if he did—

“It’s really simple at the heart of it,” Valerie said.  “It’s about eliminating variables, you know?  Practically just algebra.”

Ed’s throat felt like a desert.  He coughed into his hand.  There was actual fucking sand in his palm when he drew it away.  Fancy that.

“It’s way more than just algebra,” he said.  “It’s frigging brilliant.”

He was double-minded, and the two halves were tearing him down the fucking middle.  On the one hand, he wanted her to get as far away from Kimblee as she could—across several fucking state lines if possible.  On the other, he just wanted that cruel fucking bastard to _look_ at her for a second; the fact that people ignored her all the time was the very thing that had pushed her to this extreme of fucking desperation—

And Kimblee knew it.  Kimblee knew people the instant he laid eyes on them—knew their secrets; knew their insides; knew their mechanisms and which buttons to press to get anything he wanted out of them.  Kimblee knew that she would keep flailing for his attention for a lot longer than this; and Kimblee had known that Ed would go frozen-up and tongue-tied at the mere fucking prospect of what he was capable of.

Valerie was in the middle of a sentence, but Kimblee said, “Do you do any experiments with scalpels, love?”

Her face lit up like an over-decorated house right around Christmas.  “Yeah!”

“Don’t,” Ed croaked out.  His throat stuck, lurched, seethed; he coughed into his sleeve this time—more sand; a tiny hissing waterfall of it cascading down his arm— “Don’t—touch him, don’t—”

There were individual grains of grit on his lips; dust ran down his shirt like a falling halo gone horribly fucking wrong.  Kimblee looked right fucking at him and ran those long, long fingers through Valerie’s hair.

She giggled.  Then she held up a shining silver scalpel.

“Here, babe,” she said.

Ed tried to move—tried to dive for it; tried to throw himself at them, between them, to grab it away and shove them a safe distance apart—but he was sand straight fucking through.  The dunes collapsed in on themselves as he tried to raise his arms; he tried to cling to the fucking centrifuge, but his knees were disintegrating, and his legs were giving way—

“Pay attention,” Kimble said, touching the tip of the blade to the far side of Valerie’s throat.  She gazed up at him in fucking rapture, like she couldn’t even feel it; like she didn’t even _care_ — “You need to see this.”

“Don’t,” Ed said.  “Don’t fucking take it out on her—what’d she ever—”

The dream slipped, and the shadowed contours of the bedroom filled the space.

Ed heard himself drag in a breath.  The mattress shifted slightly; he rolled over to look.

“I’m sorry,” Roy said.  He was sitting up, arms wrapped around his knees, chin resting on them.  The sheets had bunched around his ankles, and his shoulders rose and dropped with a long, slow sigh.

“I’m not,” Ed said.  His voice rasped dry, and the panic surged in his chest for a second until he cleared his throat.  “Was ready to be done with that fucking dream anyway.”

Roy smiled wanly.  “Then I am both sorry and glad to be of service.”

Ed scooted over on his side close enough to lean his head against Roy’s hip a little bit.  Roy reached down and—

_God_ , if he touched Ed’s hair right now, that’d—it’d—he’d—

But he just reached for Ed’s hand, knitting their fingers together and giving it a gentle squeeze.

“You want to talk about it?” Ed asked—for good measure, rather than because he thought Roy actually would.  That was sort of the unwritten rule, wasn’t it?  If you didn’t think about it—didn’t talk about it, didn’t dignify it with your breath or your brain, didn’t grace it with your contemplation or your pain—you felt like it _had_ to have less power over you.  Like if you never looked right at it, it had to let you go.

“No,” Roy said, right on cue.  He lifted Ed’s hand with his and kissed the knuckles, smoothing his thumb across them before he set it down again.  “Thank you, though.”

“Shit,” Ed said.  “We’re a pair of sad sacks, aren’t we?”

“We’re a pair of people,” Roy said.  “And we’re doing the best we can.  As far as I’m concerned, anyone who asks for more than that can fuck themselves.”

“But not right here,” Ed said through a yawn that almost broke his fucking jaw.  “I don’t wanna see that shit.”

“You sure?” Roy asked.  “What if it was… who’s a celebrity you like?”

“You,” Ed said.

“I don’t believe I count,” Roy said.

“I don’t believe I care,” Ed said.

Roy twisted enough to lean down and kiss Ed’s ear—which tickled, but in a kinda-good way.

“Ed,” Roy said, devastatingly soft-voiced and sincere, “I love you.”

Ed cracked an eye open to look up at him—all gorgeous fucking dark edges and the slow curve of a smile.

“I love you, too,” he said, and a little bit of the desert was in his throat again.  “Go to sleep.”

“You first,” Roy said.

  


* * *

  


The upshot—that is, “upshot” as in “upwards of four espresso shots”—is that he’s able to turn his compartmentalization brain up to its highest natural setting and push all of this shit aside long enough to deliver a seriously kickass seminar to the students crowded into the hall at the University of Edinburgh.

It’s amazing to him that different groups of people always ask new questions—trends emerge, of course, and there are things he’s tacked onto his presentations over the years because they’re basically FAQs at this point.  Somehow, though, the combination of cultural mores and regional scientific specialties always cooks up a couple of surprises for him.

He fucking loves that.  He loves that the world, _humanity_ , the minds of individuals scattered through across the dirt-place they call home, never fail to come up with something unexpected and completely new.  That’s the whole point of science, really—finding things.  The universe keeps a perpetually infinite amount of secrets; no matter how many you turn up, there’s always something different.  There’s always more.

The train ride from Edinburgh to Glasgow is less than an hour and a half, but he spends it with his nose practically pressed to the window.  Fucking Scotland is fucking gorgeous, and he isn’t sure he ever wants to leave.  Sure, they’ve got some nice stuff at home, but maybe he could convince Al and Win and Roy to move out here and get new jobs, and they could all go in together on a countryside castle and maybe buy a lordship to split four ways, and…

Probably you can’t divvy up a royal title.

Probably he shouldn’t let his phone connect to wifi until after he’s done the Glasgow lecture, so that the possibility of Roy’s response won’t distract him while he works.

He leans his head against the windowpane and watches the green hills roll past.  The shuddering of the train prevents him from falling asleep to the dream-ready rhythm of their contours; every now and then they pass one dotted with white sheep.

He’s going to be okay.  He can feel it, now, for once.  That has to count for something.


End file.
